Skull engine development begins
From Seoushi Games
Some of you might have noticed that I have a projects page now. I've also listed my current project which for now I'm calling the skull engine although it might be more like a library. I've made some progress on the design front however, looking back on older engines I have created I have noted the things that I liked and disliked about them. Right now I'm in the step of combining all of those ideas and a few new ones (like api independence) and compiling them into a full design idea.
It might interest you on how I plan to develop this library as I'm making claims that it will be easy to use and be documented well, promises that others have made and not kept. My process might be slower as a whole but better in the long run. The first step is make a good design and how things will interact (nothing new here). After that I will goto my coding phase, however this isn't how most programmers do this phase. First I will flesh out all of the headers, document everything possible and take a step back and try to make examples with these headers and see how the real interaction works. Once I've completed the last phase I will go and fill in actual meat of the program. By doing this I don't waste time rewriting interfaces and hacking things together as if it was an after thought, instead I can restructure things cleanly until something good comes of it.
Api independent is a must for this project because many people have different preferences on their graphics, sound, input or whatever library it may be. Personally I prefer SDL but I know others that think GLFW is the king, so if I were to make my library dependent upon one library it would turn off many people. That being said the api dependent parts will be in extendable interfaces and will separate from the engine itself. Later on when things have matured more, more api's can be added to the mix instead of just the base api's used for testing.
I think that about sums up my idea, I hope I can get this project done in a reasonable time frame.