Featured Projects

Abraxas

Abraxas is an updated and upgraded version of the Planar Strife game engine. It is still in development. It now has support for DirectX (while still providing GDI+ as a fallback option), and can play media files in a variety of formats. These features were originally developed as part of World of Run & Escape-craft, and have now been integrated into the Planar Strife engine, with several additional improvements.

The game engine has the following features:

• A trigger-based scripting language for level design
• Saving is available at any point in the game
• Automatic online updating of the game executable and level data
• Support for multiple player characters
• Support for GDI+ and DirectX

Scripting Improvements

The scripting has been improved to support pointers (not all pointer mechanics have been implemented, but they can be used as variables that point to other variables instead of containing a value) and loops, as well as more complex scripting flow and object attributes. Support for new graphical special effects has been introduced.

All C# game code that referenced the player has been removed, and now the player and collision detection mechanics can entirely be implemented in the scripting language. This allows game developers greater freedom when designing levels where they may wish to use an alternative control scheme, or have multiple players. There is now the potential to design alternative genres such as RTS or TBS, instead of a top down RPG where you control a single player character.

The solution now contains 3 projects, and 9,500 lines of C# code. Most of the new code is in the revamped graphics library, followed by the updated scripting and audio.

Technologies Used:

• C#
• GDI+
• DirectX (via Gorgon)
• WinMM (via Org.Mentalis.Multimedia & TagLib#)

Networking support may be added at a later date.

Diagram of basic system architecture: