CPSC340 Game Development

I've been working on both Project2015 and a class I am teaching this fall. The Project2015 stuff is going very slow and has seemingly lost a ton of momentum. Work has had a tough deadline and this looming class I'm teaching is starting to consume my extra time as I prepare.

The class is on Game Engine Development. My plan so far is to use XNA and C#. I had wanted to use Torque/C++, but the XNA/C# stuff has made some sense and we have been going in that direction. I still want to get in some C++ work and I'm trying to figure out how to do that at this point.

The open source engine is going to be called Panther Game Engine. I've already setup a source forge project for it and have been slowly configuring the group. I still have about 6 weeks, but that doesn't feel like much time.

I've completed all the SVN setup and have my lecture for that planned. I still want to create a screen cast of the process so it will be even clearer.

The term "Game Engine" is heavlily loaded and not well defined. For me, it's all about tools to make building games easier. So, I've been creating the shell of a level editor for xna. The toughest part was integrating XNA and Windows Forms. I have that working and ended up using a piece of Microsoft sample code and have tried to segment it from the open source project as best I could. This really should be part of the XNA release and not some separate set of code, but at least there is a sample of how to do this.

Next up is working on a terrain system, then I want to get the animation work flow down. Lots to do.