Haha yes I was as shocked as you were!.. Wtf is a curry without rice!
(a swanky logo)
I posted a lil demo of it a while back. Not showing much back then, but here is a screenshot of the latest progress.
Hmm that post seems to have been deleted for some reason.. so here is what i posted back then.
http://skn3.acsv.net/junk/entitydemo.zip
(this giant thing is 1 root entity with lots of child entities attatched to it. All rotation, scale, positions are calculated automatically recursively)
And here is some information about it...
Features are still in development but here are a few key points:
+ Comprehensive entity system.
- scaling
- rotating
- flipping
- animation
- parent/child relationship with other entities (this includes inherited rotation/scale/position)
- collisions (bounding, rect, polygon hull)
- rigid/soft body physics (physics component being worked on by a team member)
+ Game "runtimes"
The engine lets you plug a "runtime" into the engine. One at a time. Your runtime is extended from a root runtime type, 'acruntime'. This runtime acts as a level, menu, screen, bonus screen or whatever your game needs.
There will be (platform runtime currently in creation) pre created runtimes to use or extend. These will allow quick creation of certain types of games. For example the platform game runtime. It will include a selection of entity types extended from the main entity type that make creating a platform game easier.
- Start / End runtime transition effects
- Change game mode by calling engine.setruntime(myruntime)
+ Controller plugin
I have taken all the tedious code out of writting an input template for your game. You create a controller object and add a few buttons. The controller could be keyboard, joypad, mouse or something else if an extended class was created for it.
You can set detailed "tick" rates for each button by passing an array ov time values. Passing this
[1000,500,250,125,62,31,15,7,3,1,0] would make the control.buttondown() report at ever increasing intervals if said button was held down. Useful perhaps for an autofire/hold to charge fire power in shooter game ?
Right at this moment I am working on a combo system for the controller object. This lets you create a combo that consists of a command queue...
press button, hold button upto 100 ms, release button, optional delay upto 100ms, press down, release all...
it will watch for this chain of commands in sequence and the game can call a function at anytime to see if the combo was carried out. A good example how to use this, double tap and hold a direction to run instead of walking.
Is that enough information yet ?
From the screenshot you can see I have viewports. Usefull for instant splitscreen. Setting up a viewport takes about 4 lines of code and will render another duplicate of the runtime you add it to. Each viewport can be "scrolled" to different locations and has its own render function if needed.
Basically the engine is going to be a pretty much complete solution for 2d games :)
... at least I hope so anyway!