MinGRo game engine

[Ñuño Martínez]

Project is far to dead.

After releasing a new Allegro.pas version I'm working in MinGRo. I want to release a new alpha version this Friday, so I can use it in Ludum Dare and TINS.

There are many changes, most subsystems are now more robust and with better API (I think). Some of the latest changes where to fix data loading and configuration management. Previous version was confusing and a bit buggy. Also I've improved the sound subsystem.

So a lot of under-the-hood work fixing bugs and improving design, much with the GUI subsystem which was quite confusing even for me! Now it has a more coherent design, it is easier to use and the map editor have (finally!) a proper file selection dialog:
200413_202543.png
It is inspired in the file selector from 3D Construction Kit. I liked it because it is simple. On Windows it is a little bit different: Instead of the "CD", "media" and "mnt" buttons it has 5 buttons for drives.

And see how much has evolved graphically:
170318_1824.png

[Ñuño Martínez]

Ok, did it. And four hours before Ludum Dare (yay!). If you're curious, visit the project page. And if you test it, let me know what do you think.

[Ñuño Martínez]

I'm quite happy. Today I've finished a simple music sequencer that uses the PSG to generate music, and you can use BASIC Music Meta Language (MML) to generate music. I is quite simple and I'm sure it can be improved, but at the moment you can add music in a very simple way.

But I don't like the PSG sound right now. It doesn't sound very old school. It generates triangular waveforms, and it should generate square ones, like good old micros did. I think this will be the next thing I'll do.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Well, LD didn't go very well, but it and later TINS allowed me to find some bugs in the engine. I fixed three of them and made a new release (1.a.3.1). Note this doesn't includes the new functionality added in TRUNK, they'll be published in version 1.a.4.

As a curiosity, I did a stream showing how I did fixed them in Twitch. I know my English is horrible but some friends joined me and said they enjoyed a bit (well, one said he didn't ).

[Ñuño Martínez]

This can be in the Green Onions: The I-Ching Saga thread, but it is more related with MinGRo so here I am.

These months I was working a lot on the engine, specially fixing bugs. A lot of them were discovered while making the final version of the GO game. The last release is 1.α.4 but I'll release 1.α.4.1 soon (maybe this weekend) to apply all these bugs I've fixed. At the moment they're in the SVN repository.

Most of the bugs are like dude, how is it possible you didn't saw that obvious mistake? Anyway most are fixed, so it is good.

I want to say also that version 1.α.5 will take a while, not only because I have to finish the GO game but also because I made a big decision, I'll not talk about it yet because I know some of you will scream "Don't do it!" but I've really meditate the pros and cons and I think it is the best move.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Still working in the Green Onions game (dude, it's taking too long ) and I'm confirming things about the engine. Actually I think it is pretty solid (after so much changes) but:

• There's a lot of over-engineering and
• Game code isn't so clean (and classic) as I intended.

Today I realized that part of the problem is that the engine is too much generic: I was thinking in any game genre and style.

So once the GO game is finished I've decided to focus the engine in a single direction: 2D action games. That should simplify things enough to remove all over-engineering and help to use more classic programing style. And for the other game genres/styles I want to do (3D action games and interactive fiction) I can create other engines using this as base/inspiration.

Then I've read this thread at Lazarus' forum and now I'm thinking about the possibility to integrate it in to Lazarus. I should think more about it (and once the game is finished), but instead to integrate with Lazarus I think it is better to build an IDE similar to UNITY using my engine and PascalScript, then use FPC to build the final executable. I know, Game Maker does it, but it (or any other) doesn't use Pascal, does it?

What do you think?

[Ñuño Martínez]

With LudumDare about to start, and since I've finished the Green Onions game, I've decided to fix some stuff of the engine and I've uploaded version 1.α.4.2. Not a lot of changes but should help to avoid the stupid bugs that always prevents me to finish the game in time.

You can download it from here.

After that, I'll see what it will evolve for version 1.α.5. I have some ideas.