Telling a Tale for Ten Years

Exactly ten years ago I started this ridiculous blog as a way to collaborate with other game developers. At the time I thought I would dig deep and push out at least one title. This eventually led to the "Desktop Distractions" studio concept, and the nascent title Deskblocks. I also worked within the CrystalSpace engine as an entrant to the PlaneShift team. I just couldn't give these projects traction however, so I gave it up and moved on to tinkering.

Even though the driving force behind the blog had faded away, and even though no one else reads this blog (aside from the State of .NET Integration Frameworks post), I kept updating it. Writing - even if it exists only for your own edification - really does help with communication and critical thinking regardless of what you write about. Even though my day job has nothing to do with garage door openers, my posts on my garage door security system helped me organize the build in a way that informed the Hack Clock project. Back in 2006 I began investigating vector processing, and the resulting frameworks have helped me think about and design microservice architectures. Of course, there was plenty of venting as well with my favorite software companies being dissolved or SuSE Linux winning and failing and winning and failing again. All of this writing helped me when performing comparative analysis at work, or designing parallel architectures, or watching trends in software development.

It is hard to believe a decade has slipped by. It doesn't even seem real. I don't think I've evolved much since that one cram session in a crystal chair, but I'm glad to have my collected ramblings to reflect back on.

Apricot Blending Crystal Space

I haven't followed Project Apricot in a while - I've been out of the Blender & Crystal Space 3D scene for a while now. It appears to have taken an interesting turn however.

It appears the final name is "Yo Frankie!" - finally available online or retail, including all the code & assets that went into the game. Both of them.

Errr... what?

Evidently the project forked - one fork was done entirely within Blender, the other built specifically for Crystal Space. There appear to be differing accounts as to why the for occured; the Blender Foundation claims that this was due to advances in Blender's own game engine, while at the same time they appear to say that there were too many technical difficulties to marry the Blender Game Engine and Crystal Space 3D. Ultimately Blender's game engine remains an entity on its own, and Crystal Space walks a separate path. It seems the Blender community wasn't happy with using an engine outside of their own doors and so they walked away from integrating with a more sophisticated game engine. Integration with other engines and projects... something that could make Blender thrive in a production environment... was abandoned to work on the more primitive Blender Game Engine.

The Crystal Core project seems to have re-adjusted its ultimate aims as well, similarly finding its initial objectives far too ambitious. That makes two flagship titles that haven't been able to reach their intended goals.

I'm wondering why Apricot and Crystal Core are both having such difficulties. My guess is that content generation can be done well, engine development can be done well, but the interoperability between the two is an equal if not greater effort. Compare the tools Eskil created for Love to the Blender + Crystal Space tools: building models and meshes in Blender can be fairly arduous and requires a lot of reference material while Loq Ariou can create meshes using freehand and UV texture mapping in Blender is a multi-step process while Eskil has created something that can do the UV mapping in a few short steps. Verse seems to be the glue that the Blender <-> Crystal Space interoperability was missing, creating a uniform way to remotely process assets and scenes.

The effort to have a Crystal Space 3D game engine within Blender would have been tough, but I believe it would have been worth it. It is definitely no easy task, but these kinds of tools are sorely needed. It is too bad Blender decided to push Crystal Space aside - I was looking forward to big things with their collaboration.

Crystal Chair

I remember, still quite distinctly, one particular moment in the December of 2002. My job wasn't what it once was, and I was starting to contribute more into some random open source projects. I wanted to see what game engines "looked like," so I downloaded the developer documentation for CrystalSpace on my (now destroyed) iPAQ. It was December however - and of course I had to do a blitz of Christmas shopping.

While walking all over the mall's green turf, I tried to read the CrystalSpace HTML docs. Finally I took a break and crashed in a lounge chair inside a Von Maur and poured through half the pages I had sync'd. It was in that chair that I was first turned on to CrystalSpace's automagic "smart pointers." When things finally clicked about factory design patterns. When I finally saw how platform-independent file mounting could work. Things largely fit into place for the first time in my head, and a rush of Computer Science courses that were starting to leak out of my brain finally kicked into place. It all weirdly made sense.

I still think of that December of 2002 whenever I pass by that chair. Last year, before I aged another decade, I provided myself with a crap-or-get-off-the-pot objective: to finally have a working game out by February of 2007 or otherwise just give up the ghost. While I did some extensive hacking, spent a lot of late nights and tried to do it, in the end I just wasn't able to produce the goods. I have a partially completed project out there, but in the end I wasn't able to make it happen. I finally gave up the daydream.

I passed by the chair yesterday and thought about how fall was coming soon. Christmas shopping season. And how I'm not going to be perched in that chair pouring over docs anymore.

A Package On Your Doorstep

I first started working with CrystalSpace in 2003. Back then compatibility would change from version to version, building CS was a regular task and CEL was still an up-and-coming project.

Then this January the team announced the first stable release of CrystalSpace; one feature-complete and ready to be production ready. It's amazing how mature the project has become since then... documentation has flourished, CEL has become a fantastic development framework, titles can be developed with little to no coding and Blender integration is now ready for prime time and sponsored by the Blender project itself.

Not only that, CrystalSpace has finally hit the prime time: binary packages are now widely available on most Linux distros. Debian has been carrying packages for a while, but now native SuSE RPM's are available via PackMan.

No, you shut up.

Now people can develop entire titles while only focusing on content creation and scripting, allowing people to focus on what makes a game a game. Not only that, there are copious templates and examples for how to build projects. And you no longer have to build packages every night. And it's open source and readily available. It blows my mind.

I've Never Been So Excited for an Apricot

Blender has been the model editor of choice for CrystalSpace for a long, long time. Most of my CrystalSpace documentation has revolved around using Blender to create content for CrystalSpace code. The two together are like peanut butter and bananas. Fantastic.

Recently Jorrit made an exciting announcement on behalf of the CS team - Blender and CrystalSpace are partnering to build Apricot, an independently developed and completely open game title. To fully understand my unbridled enthusiasm you have to understand Elephants Dream, originally called Blender's project Orange. This was an open movie project - a full movie title with all content released under a flexible Creative Commons license. Textures, models, all production files are freely available. This did unbelievable things for Blender. Not only did this give users access to professionally generated content, new documentation and a whole new realm of tutorials it also pushed the envelope for Blender itself. Orange generated demand for whole new genres of features, and kept the Blender development team pushing point release after point release to keep up. If I recall correctly, Blender's hair generation system was largely built due to demands made by artists creating content for Elephants Dream. Not only did the movie promote Blender, it made Blender a production-quality product that could demonstrate it was ready for prime time.

The same envelope is getting ready to be pushed for CrystalSpace now. That's where my unbridled enthusiasm lies; CrystalSpace has been a commercial-quality 3D engine for a while now, but now every stage of the production process will be thoroughly tested and fleshed out. While I have no doubt that this project will result in enhanced functionality grown by the demands of the game developers, I'm most excited about the tool chain being completely fleshed out. In my mind while the Blender exporters for CS were fantastic, all the corner cases hadn't been completely covered. With Apricot, model exporters should be polished, skeletal animation should be more integrated into Blender armatures, physics should be more strictly related to Blender riggings and meshes should have attributes that more exactly equate to CrystalSpace equivalents. This should make the entire end-to-end content generation process as smooth as a polished stone.

Nothing like a real-life, production quality project will take the edges off of the various and sundry tools used for development. It's amazing how much one will forbear when it's not a "huge issue," but when you encounter the same "not a huge issue" twenty times a day it suddenly becomes something worth tackling. Ideas and features may be the result of inspiration, but the remaining 99% of time spent refining a project is sheer perspiration. I'm looking forward to both projects' continued trial by fire, and seeing what has been forged once the fires have quieted down.

Running at 100%

I'm knee-deep in the depths of development. I have so much to tell you, good and faithful reader, but time is a fickle mistress. I already feel extreme pangs of guilt having fallen behind on ConsultComm bugfixes and feature releases.

A huge cheer and huzzah to CrystalSpace for releasing 1.0. This is an amazingly huge accomplishment. If you've ever needed a 3D game engine, look no further now. It's now feature-complete and stable.

Item! Linspire's (formerly Lindows) Click 'N Run software is now being distributed for Linux distributions at large. Now every Linux user can take advantage of it's clickishness and runocity. Some may think that this is just a overly verbose apt-get, but it's not. Since it also can provision commercial software, this may turn out to be the Steam of desktop applications. That, my friend, would be a killer app.

Microsoft's new intellectual property blitz is hilarious. Their understanding of how creators "feel" about copyright law is laughable.

SecondLife's client software is now available under the GPL. Icculus had already been working on a Linux port, but now the whole community gets to jump in and help. Better yet, Linden Labs has just added a staff of several thousand developers that offer bugfixes, ports and ideas free of charge. I'm hoping this works out well for them - all eyes are on the project now.

If you hadn't guessed already, I'll buy anything Carmack makes.