Going International

Hello everyone. I know I really should update this blog more often... I'm trying, really! Things are really starting to move forward over here. A few more little features to finish up and it will be time to start a small game. This project started out with a simple desire to learn more about the math behind graphics and physics coding and has turned into a full-blown desire to make something awesome. Don't worry, I have quite a bit of experience in software architecting and the amount of effort that goes into making a game (it is what I do for a living, after all), so there's no need to fear that I'll be jumping off the deep end and trying to compete with a commercial AAA product with my little project I devote maybe an hour per day to single-handedly.

That said, I'll be starting on a version of Pong I've been thinking of for the last couple of months. That's right, Pong. "But why do you need all this fancy 3D technology and a real game engine to make Pong?" you may ask. Wait and see, my friend, wait and see.

Anyhow, on the update front, there have been lots of new toys and updates added to the engine, the most recent of which is support for true-type fonts (and pretty much any other type) utilizing the FreeType library (http://www.freetype.org/). With this added functionality there's now real support for unicode text within the engine, which is awesome for making localization easier. I've also added support for sprites with transformations calculated on the GPU, as well as simple 2D rendering via a very easy to use interface. In addition to that, single-pass multi-texturing is also available, able to render as many textures in a single pass as your video card can handle.

Overall, it's been a productive month, as far as a project being done in my "freetime" can be considered productive. I can't wait to actually start work on Pong. I love game dev.