IRC Chat Log and comments
Well, a little
later than expected but here it comes the
post about our last IRC meeting. First, I would like to thank all the people
who attended, Jade users and devs, but I would like to especially thank Borrillis for coming. If you
didn't know him, he is the current developer of Axiom and SharpInputSystem.
Why was another engine developer in Jade meeting?
Well, the main subject of our meeting was to see what would we do for our next
release. We have been working in the engine internals and we have found that several parts are really too hard to improve
without a complete rewrite. So we wanted to see how much people could help, and
depending on that we would do either minor core
changes or a complete rewrite. Even if we missed some people in the meeting because
of exams (these dates are really hard for students), we decided in the end to
go for the rewrite. That's where Axiom makes
sense: a complete rewrite is a very hard affair, so we plan to take things here
and there from other open source projects to speed things.
So far our idea is to build our new scenegraph using
OpenSceneGraph as a base and study
the Axiom renderer and materials system to see how well it would work with Jade's
current renderer and EffectBuilder. We also plan on
using SharpInputSystem for the new input. We aren't going to reinvent anything if we can avoid it :)
Another of
our objectives is to make the engine more ".NETish": currently most
engines out there are built in a "C++ way", and while C++ is nice for
some things, the .NET way of thinking is pretty
different for others. So expect things to
be more like .NET in the engine (events, delegates, reflection, and things like
that). There's a great deal of code using these features in Pluto, so you can
check there and see for yourself.
And well, you can read the chat log in this URL:
http://jadengine.dreamhosters.com/index.php?title=24/05/2007_-_Jade_1.2_Meeting
If you are asking yourself "what's
that site?", the answer is that it will be the new
Jade site/wiki :) So far it has all the old material (thanks to Reed for
setting everything up), but several sections (features, what's coming and
FAQs) badly need an update, so we won't be promoting much yet (but it should go live soon).