Evenings are dark again!

Here's one more short post, and a warning that I'm on holiday for one week beginning Friday, so my next post may end up being scheduled and therefore old news.

I shall be here in a week. Expect numerous photographs, of nowhere near this artistic quality.

I've actually made decent progress with the game - I'm now at 6.5K lines of Java code, which to be fair doesn't sound like much, but does represent significant progress. By comparison, Unreal Engine + Editor is reportedly over 1.4M lines, Source SDK at 780K, Quake 3 at 310K, and the Crysis SDK at 280K lines. In any case, judging a program by the number of lines of code is like judging an aircraft by its weight [quote shamelessly paraphrased from Bill Gates]. I'm aiming to have a working renderer with terrain, water, models and UI working in "real" space within the week - which should be achievable. One significant annoyance for me is that OpenGL intentionally doesn't have any native way of handling fonts - which is going to add a significant amount of code (unless I cheat, and just bake every bit of text into images, which isn't possible for stuff like resource count).

Once I've got the renderer up and running, the rest of the engine is actually much less complex in terms of the maths, and doesn't have to be nearly as efficient or fast. Keeping everything in sync across a network isn't too bad as long as you aren't doing any prediction (for those who are interested, there's a very impressive explanation of how games like Counter-Strike predict movement over in the Valve wiki or for the older Quake here) From there all I need to know in terms of engine is skeletal animation (I could probably implement it now, but don't fully understand it - there's some maths we simply haven't covered - Quaternions - from what I understand, essentially multi-dimensional imaginary numbers - the extension of an Argand diagram into 3 or 4 dimensional space - too many hyphens - I think not!). After that the client needs sound, encryption and streaming of textures/file manager, and then is finished.  Server-side requires a file server, gameplay logic, account manager and AI (PvP would of course solve this, but it's worth having very basic AI to help the game start and get people acquainted with controls and basic gameplay). From there, my job is level design tools. supporting the artists and gameplay, and the website/backend.

Ambitious? Yes. Achievable? Let's find out, shall we?
Charlie