Well, I haven't been working on Xarble for quite a while... Now I've graduated, and have a job, and I realize that I didn't know what free time meant back in school. I still have a bunch of ideas for Xarble, and someday I'll put them all together. I am going to update the look of these Xarble pages, though, so they look a little less 1998.

I took out the stupid background image, and re-did this page with CSS. I have to get to bed, but I'll do the rest of the pages when I get back from Washington.

The guys at anvdesign.net got bought, or something, and they cancelled my account without really telling me. I finally got around to getting another host for xarble.org, so here I am, at pair.com.

www.Xarble.ORG is now ONLINE!  Big thanks to anvdesign.net for giving me a great deal on the space, with their Deal of the Day!

Okay, I was mentioning to someone what needs to be worked on, so, instead of figure it out every time someone asks, I'm going to put it up here, and probably, eventually, I'll make a seperate page for it.

• Graphics Subsystem
  What's Done

  Well, I've implemented basic vertices, with color, normal, and texture coordinate attributes, and a composite model system. Each object is a compilation of sub-objects, and primitives. Primitives are just GL primitives.

  What Needs to be Done
  

  The very next thing on my list is a camera object, that basically acts like a normal 3d object, but when you translate it, it moves the camera position. The render might have an array of different camera positions, so youse can switch between them, easily.

  But wait! There's more! A lot more, actually. Some sort of animation system needs to be set up. I have nothing done or even planned for that. Also, some sort of file format needs to be decided on for the models and animation, and readers and writers and converters written for it.

• UI Subsystem
  What's Done

  A basic widget set has emerged from a couple late-night coding sessions. It tracks the mouse and draws a custom mouse pointer (which is just a png file). I have a picture widget that can display whatever picture you want, and a button widget, that displays 2 pictures, one for pressed and one for unpressed. I also have a widget for smooth-scrolling text overlay of arbitrary size.

  What Needs to be Done
  

  The code needs to be cleaned up tremendously, and many more widgets need to be added. Things like text input boxes, lists, dropdown lists, tree lists, and a better text display widget. I need to choose an event paradigm and stick with it. Right now, widgets get passed global (screen) coordinates, but I think I want to have them get passed coordinates local to the widget, even though it's more math (just subtraction and addition). I also need to create a class to abstract XEvent, in case we ever want to port it, which I assume we will. Besides, XEvent is nasty.

• Event Subsystem
  What's Done
  

  Not much.

  What Needs to be Done
  

  I have been putting this off while I work on things with more immediate gratification, like the UI and Graphics engines. There needs to be a way to queue and execute events, and various other ways to trigger events, by various actions in maps, on objects, etc... This kind of integrates with the scripting engine.

• Scripting Subsystem
  What's Done
  

  Very little.

  What Needs to be Done
  

  I haven't done anything with this, so pretty much the whole scripting engine needs to be done. Somehow, we need to be able to load and execute java code for certain events, and that java code needs to be able to manipulate game objects, via some sort of native API or something. At least, this is what I envision. I don't really want to work on this right now, if someone wants to take it off my hands... :D

• Sound Subsystem
  What's Done
  

  Nothing at all.

  What Needs to be Done
  

  Someone needs to come up with some sort of sound engine. I don't want to do anything with sound until I have a semi-functioning game already. It's of the least importance in my book, at this point.

• Game Subsystem
  What's Done
  

  Quite a lot, actually. Most of the basic data structures for representing objects, weapons, armor, living things, etc, have been written, and are able to interact with each other. Living things can wear armor, wield weapons, attack other living things. Armor affects dodge, you can layer armor, all of that stuff is all implemented.

  What Needs to be Done
  

  Well, I need to make ammo work... right now all guns have unlimited ammo. I also need to write a Hero class, for the main character. I'm not sure that there's a whole lot left as far as this is concerned... I've been ignoring it lately in favor of the graphics and UI engines.

Okay, Chris moved to New York a long time ago, and I just assume he's not interested anymore. After putting a link on linuxgames.org, I've had some people interested in helping. Anyway, there is a new screen shot on the screen shots page.

I've been depressed enough lately that working on Xarble is hard for me to gather up the motivation to do. Chris is still learning OpenGL, and so we failed to meet our deadline miserably. I think it's too much, considering the engine rewrite, and especially since any of my UI stuff is dependant on graphic engine stuff. So, we'll get some stuff done, and then set another deadline to FINISH it... but not right now, I have a midterm tomorrow.

Chris and I have decided on a deadline for all the stuff we have assigned to the next release, v0.1.0 lite. The deadline is the middle of next month, September 14th. So, check out the schedule page to see exactly what that will involve. Wish us luck!

Well, Chris and I are going to get together sometime in the next couple days, and set a deadline for having our next release done. It will probably be a long time, because there are going to be some major graphics engine changes, as we are going to switch from an isometric tile-based system to an OpenGL 3-D loosely tile-based system. I guess that's big news in itself. Lucklily, much of the work is already done in the graphics engine part, as Ko and I wrote one for 3D Spy Hunter... So we'll just have to use that and revamp it, and all that fun stuff.

It's funny, this game started out tile-based, then we made it 3-D, then it was tile based, now it's 3-D again. I am hesitant to change it again, for obvious reasons. If we keep changing it, it'll never get done. The RPG stuff is completely independant, though, so at least we get to keep that. This game was just looking a little too much like Fallout, even though I had come up most of the design before Diablo came out. Not that there's nothing wrong with being similar to Fallout, it's a great game, but, honestly, I think 3D is easier to work with. Perhaps more difficult to animate, I don't know. We'll have to see.

Okay, there is mostly bad news today. I haven't been working on Xarble too much, because of work and all, but I'm trying to get back into the swing of things, and it's happening, slowly, but surely. Final Fantasy VII is also reducing productivity, but it's generating creative energy, so it's good and bad.

Even more bad news, my two partners, Sherman and Kandarp, have dropped out of the project, in favor of other things, so now I'm out programmers, too. My roommate, Chris, is interested in helping, but he works a lot, so he doesn't have the time to devote to it that I do. (I just go to school, so I have lots of free time.) Anyway, so we really need programmers and whatnot, as well as artists, musicians, and so on.

I just added a "People Involved" page above. That's about it.

Well, I've written most of the Java wrappers for the script-relevant C++ objects. ve decided that instead of trying to do any sort of parallel object tree maintainance, anytime an object is returned from the Xarble API, it'll just create a new JSL wrapper object. Since the Java wrappers will point to the same C++ object, it won't matter. And the Virtual Machine will clean up after me! (Garbage collection, Duh!)

• Finish Java Wrappers for Living, Body, Race, and any other Xarble Object classes that I write (Hero class, maybe one for Explosives, anything else that crops up).
• Write Java API Wrapper class, finish Java Constant class.
• Write the Java Native methods in C that wrap around the C++ Xarble Object classes' methods.
• Get Kaffe working on my machine.
• Install libkaffevm in Xarble, to get our JVM running in the same process as Xarble.
• Seperate the Xarble Cross-Platform code into libXarble, just for the sake of having it seperate. This isn't really necessary or even directly pertaining to JSL, but I thought I would mention it here.

Our deadline for Xarble v0.1.0 lite has come and gone, with very little having progressed beyond v0.0.1 (lite). I wrote races and body types and stuff. That was a major rewrite, though probably nothing anyone would notice. Good thing this is a hobby, and there's no produciton pressure, or I'd just have to hack everything in, and it would be crappy and have none of the rich detail that Xarble is developing.