Latest developments

We’ve been doing work in the shadows, even if it doesn’t appear that way.

The latest thing we’ve been doing mainly consists of updating our Apps and making sure they have the kind of content that we want in them, as well as squashing out bugs.

We recently just updated iRis AG to v1.3, which we put a lot of really interesting changes to the background themes to make them more lively (and trippy). We pulled a few fixes from the EGW:B6 line to fix some things in the EGW:A3 line, such as with the labels being a bit fuzzy and finally patching the RB tree code. We also are not going to go beyond EGW:A3 for the ‘Anton’ architecture, being that it’s superseded by the ‘Bruno’ architecture and soon that will be superseded by the ‘Caesar’ architecture.

Speaking of updates, we’re also updating the EGW:B5 line to the final EGW:B6 line, possibly a EGW:B7 line if we need to. The main thing that is going to keep us from an EGW:B7 line is if we decide to just straight out switch to the ‘Caesar’ architecture revision for the next game we make… or we may just use the ‘Bruno’ architecture again… We haven’t looked at our options as deeply as we’d like to just yet because we’re trying to get EGW:B6 out the door and Tower Assault! updated with the new revisions.

In the EGW:B6 revision, we’ve done a lot of performance optimization work, especially around the main graphics renderer, sound mixer, and physical actuator classes. Basically a lot of pre-cached pointer IMPs again, but also modifications to how plug-ins should fit into our widgets and such.

Probably the biggest concern for a ‘Caesar’ architecture would be streamlining the drawing process to use less draw calls via batching. In my talks with the lead developer over at Gameloft Montreal, seems that that turned out to be their biggest bottleneck and they had to spend some considerable work on batching code.

The other biggest concern for a ‘Casear’ architecture is just tools development, and we wanted to get the engine building onto the desktop so we could have a desktop deployed editor for our GAMX asset manifests… Would really be nice to be able to edit some of the EGW specific settings in a GUI and not by hand in an XML file.

And of course, the other aspect of ‘Caesar’ would be to have full support of shaders, which we haven’t actually screwed around with.

Maybe we’ll do a C++ for ‘Dora’.

At any rate, basically we just have infrastructure changes around RPNi to support future development work, but not just in the technology department, but we also need to get our marketing materials updated with the new updates. That stuff takes quite a while to do because we have to go back into our .xcf’s, .psp’s, and .psd’s and modify a lot of imagery. It’ll look really good in the end for sure, though.

We also wanted to redo the movie for iRis AG, and do one for Tower Assault!, which we actually didn’t ever do.

And we were also going to make iRis AG free after the Tower Assault! update goes live and we get the above finished.

As far as new games we have on the drawing board, which this may be a conversation best had a month down the road, we have two games we were looking at possibly making: a JRPG (which we would need to find a decent writer to help us with, since in those games storyline makes or breaks the experience), and a pandemic like hacker game (which is, on par, much easier to do, and we may be able to get away with just using EGW:B6 or go ahead with an EGW:B7 update).

Lots of decisions to be making, at any rate, and a lot of work to be doing, for sure.

But we’re still here! ^_^