Jad Engine Blog

We’ve been pretty quiet these last weeks: not many forums posts, no blog posts,… But we have been doing some work related to 1.2 objectives (rework the engine internals). Reed has launched a new project called Pluto (Plugin Toolkit) who is aimed to give plugin support to any .NET app (it’s not tied to Jade although Jade uses it). This will allow us to have a robust support for plugins within the engine and tie the functionality more to interfaces and less to the implementation (so we can swap plugins in the future, for example for music or for physics).

Also, there are 2 new tools around: one is a FTP sync who allows you to sync your data folders with our FTP, so you don’t have to download everything again every time we change a effect file or a texture for the tutorials. Getting the data in the correct place and with the correct configuration.xml file continues to be a problem most new people usually have, so let’s hope this tool makes it easier. The other tool is an attribute/documentation viewer: Pluto has added a new attribute called CompletionStatus that tells you the completion status of a class, method,… (clever naming  ;)). This attribute it’s very useful for us as we can have a general overview of the engine classes and namespaces and see where more work is needed or what parts are completed. Now the thing is adding this attribute to all the engine classes, but we will come to it. 

But the biggest changes on the engine are yet to come and we have been talking about them a lot in the last week. We are going to hold a meeting on IRC on Thursday 24^th at 10 PM GMT +1, so feel free to come there and tell us what do you think of the changes we are planning. We would like to have your feedback on what we talk on Thursday because it will mean a lot for the engine future. For the people who don’t know our IRC info, there it is:

Server: arcor.de.eu.dal.net (the server has the bad habit of kicking out people from time to time…)

Channel: #JadEngine