Progress so far?

I took it upon myself to checkout the repo posted in the information subforum, and I'm wondering exactly where to begin with it. Since these forums have been up for so long, it seems that the direction has changed several times, and I'm not sure where it's settled. My best guess is that the BEATEngine is the engine that will be fleshed out and used for Thrive, (side note: is it using AGAR? I've never heard of it, but I'm seeing references to it in the code) but again I'm not really sure what is needed, or where to begin with it. I guess it's written in DX, so if it's being built for Linux as well, like is says on the moddb page, OGL would make more sense.

It seems like there is no lack of ideas, but that the actual programming aspect of it has received relatively little attention. As far as I can tell, there are two other programmers, roadkillguy and Bashinerox, who I can't tell if he is still active or not. What exactly should I be doing? Working on the engine, sure, but where and how? I've seen a lot of enthusiasm, and optimism especially about how close the cell stage is to completion, but nothing in the code base looks like anything is near completion. Am I wrong? Is that the wrong repo? Don't get me wrong, it all looks amazing, and the concept is great, and (at least in the evolution aspect) there is definitely progress being made, but I just don't really know where to begin.

I'm sorry if this comes off as harsh, I'm just a little lost.

Bashinerox wrote most of that code, he was trying to create an engine and then get into the Organism Editor, but he hasn't been around for quite a while, so we're assuming he is a nonentity. AGAR is for building a UI, and I believe he was leaning towards using OGL and not DX.

Until recently, we've had only bits and pieces of the concept for programmers to work on, and a severe shortage of programmers. (Two) That's why there's been little coding- we've had no one of competency here to do it. Cell stage isn't done, but we have (today) decided that it must be made immediately.

Hm. Do you think that the optimum approach is to try to continue using bash's code? His efforts are admirable, but there's so many holes and what not in the base that I can't really tell what has been:
1) Implemented
2) Marked as not implemented
3) Not implemented but not marked

I guess I should probably talk to roadkill about it, but it seems like co-opting a different graphics engine (Ogre or something) would allow at least a basic tech demo to be released much faster than if everything is rewritten, or if I have to figure out the BEATengine and what it's missing. (I can't even get it to compile - his makefile generates an error.) As long as there are no objections, I'll start on getting ogre together and see what I can do.

guitar999111 wrote:

Hm. Do you think that the optimum approach is to try to continue using bash's code? His efforts are admirable, but there's so many holes and what not in the base that I can't really tell what has been:
1) Implemented
2) Marked as not implemented
3) Not implemented but not marked

I guess I should probably talk to roadkill about it, but it seems like co-opting a different graphics engine (Ogre or something) would allow at least a basic tech demo to be released much faster than if everything is rewritten, or if I have to figure out the BEATengine and what it's missing. (I can't even get it to compile - his makefile generates an error.) As long as there are no objections, I'll start on getting ogre together and see what I can do.

QFT

guitar999111 wrote:

Hm. Do you think that the optimum approach is to try to continue using bash's code? His efforts are admirable, but there's so many holes and what not in the base that I can't really tell what has been:
1) Implemented
2) Marked as not implemented
3) Not implemented but not marked

I guess I should probably talk to roadkill about it, but it seems like co-opting a different graphics engine (Ogre or something) would allow at least a basic tech demo to be released much faster than if everything is rewritten, or if I have to figure out the BEATengine and what it's missing. (I can't even get it to compile - his makefile generates an error.) As long as there are no objections, I'll start on getting ogre together and see what I can do.

I'm all for OGRE.

OGRE is both OpenGL and DirectX. It simply allows the user to specify which he/she would like to use, while providing a standard library for things. Personally, I think we should go with raw OpenGL.

I've created a repository on sourceforge. I don't want to use any of Bashi's code, because it was more in the direction of metashapes and marching cubes to create an animal. While that would be great in the future, and we will implement it, we need to focus on raw low level game engine things.

hg clone ssh://roadkillguy@hg.code.sf.net/p/thrivegame/code thrivegame-code

I like mercurial, so that's the version control I chose. Run this in a terminal, given that you use hg, and it should create a folder with all the source (to be uploaded) in it. I'm writing a game state engine (It's very simple) as we speak.

Nice work.
OpenGL will probably be a better pick, it's more in line with what we want to do.

Now that I've read more of the forums from a while back, I can see where OpenGL as opposed to Ogre is probably a better choice.