New Addiction

OK, I've been out of pocket. Partly because of things going on at home, but mostly because of Egosoft's X3: Reunion.

This is a sandbox game. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it is such a valiant attempt at the genre that it has to be given kudos. This is game that you can really play in, and it rewards those who like to explore.

Now then. What about Vyde?

I've been polishing my programming skills at work in recent weeks. To great effect, too; I've designed a system or two now that I'm really proud of, and have managed to take away more than a couple of lessons that I plan on applying to my game design. What I'm finding most challenging right now is mastering the application of design patterns. There is such merit in studying these patterns -- it only benefits a programmer to learn them in spite of how their pursuit can seem like a time sink. But some work completed today made my pattern crunching worthwhile. So that's good. Why didn't they even expose us to these at school?

It's also good that very few interesting games are coming out in the near future. Once my X3 addiction wears off, I'll be able to concentrate more on Vyde.

Weak excuse, I know.

Threading in 3D Gaming

Cool article on something that everybody should be thinking about: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051117/gabb_01.shtml

Plugins & Scripting

I finished my first plugin architecture today for a project at work. It was really cool, actually; very easy with .NET's AppDomain.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap(). I'm very encouraged by this: the prospect of making Vyde heavily plugginable is becoming more attractive. Not only that, but in making the aforementioned plugin architecture I learned up on .NET's CodeDOM and its implications for scripting in-game elements. I'll be looking at this a lot closer. I wonder about the pros/cons of adopting C# as a scripting language...