Hermitworks Entertainment Blogs

Ran into a really cool game called Forces and it’s pretty much destroyed my morning’s productivity. Probably also the evening’s…but one never knows when WoW will strike next. Er, I mean, I’ll be working hard to make up for the lost time. Yes. Working…

Anyways, back to the coolness that is Forces. That game is perfect for the XBOX 360 and, happily, the author apparently thinks so too. Now, to see if I can attach myself to the project…

In the mean time I’ve started hacking away at maya2q3 again, in between fixing Space Trader bugs. Not so much on the plugin (though I do have plans for that), more on the x42 component. The thing is that nobody’s using it because, well, there’s simply no code out there on how to use it. True, any decent game developer could whip up a runtime in a day or so, but that’s a lot of a decent game developer’s time. It’s even worse for anyone that just wants to add skinned models to their game engine. So I’m working on putting together a simple, efficient x42 loading and rendering API which I’m calling libx42 at this point.

Thus far my goals for libx42 are to keep it small, efficient, portable, and easy to integrate into an engine. In other words:

• It’s written in C. An object-based wrapper might follow, but the core functionality is going to be in pure C.
• There are macros for platform-specific goodness, all of which are completely optional (so platforms that don’t, for instance, require or support special alignment options aren’t left out).
• The core of the code is completely independent of the CRT, and it can be compiled with a macro that completely excludes any references to it. This removes some helper functions, and makes the error messages a bit less descriptive (since vsnprintf goes away) but it will still be fully functional.
• Some other stuff that I haven’t figured out yet.

Back to angsting out at C++.