No news is good news. Polymorph is alive and kicking. The train is on its tracks. The ball is rolling.
It’s already almost a week since I’ve chatted with @frankiezafe and @louise about the advancements of their project. You might have also noted that they don’t post much either on this blog. As François says it, it’s because the progress they make is not that big of step to share, or does not produce some visuals that would look good on the blog. Back a couple weeks, when features where being added almost every day, things were exciting. Now, the real work of polishing and improving what has been initiated is actually happening and that just does not seem as exciting to share. Although it’s exciting for the team to see it growing.
A second meeting with Contredanse was much more productive and finally we started talking about gameplay. Baptiste and Florence could put their hands on the mouse and feel what a player could feel. Discussion ensued on object movements and reactions in the virtual world. The manipulation of the camera created interesting problems and awkwardness that needs to be addressed. And a common set of objects has been defined and should be limited to
François is deep into physics programming. He also took a big decision regarding all the tools he is building. Instead of trying to produce some independent Ogre libraries, he will concentrate on making it all work in the Polymorph Engine (PE). As a reminder, the PE is a bundle, a package of great open source libraries to make video games. The choice to release work as a bundle instead as independent modules is mainly a practical one. It will take less time to code. The modules are also very much interdependent for now. So making them detachable from the PE would require extra work that the team does not have at the moment. Maybe in the future. But again, making a full featured game engine on top of Ogre was always one of the goal of Polymorph. The ability to break this apart is then for later.
Where is PEEL you might ask? On hold for now. Tuning Scores is the priority since the prototype needs to be delivered by December. All eyes are on this goal now. And challenges remain, such as multiple mouses input for example. Anyway, all progress on Tuning Score is good for PEEL. So no worries, François will be back on it for Christmas.
See you next time.
PS: All screenshots by @Louise
