EmptyCrate Software. Travel. Stuff.

The first release of the new EmptyCrate Game Engine was just released. It's name is confusingly similar to the Crate Game Engine of previous releases, but no one really noticed the old engine, so I'm not too concerned about that.

EmptyCrate Game Engine allows for the creation of 1st Person 2d Adventure games using a Drupal module. Once the game is written it is rendered using a Flash 9 application embedded in the Drupal page. Making the adventure game instantly available to virtually anyone with an internet enabled device.

The engine represents the culmination of several years of ideas which finally were able to come together with the right combination of technologies. The realized goal was to make adventure games so accessible and easy to write that it would be possible to create an episodic game which is updated several times a week. Similar to a webcomic.

The first game to be written using this technology is Pinheads: Everything You Need. This first "Pinheads" game is appropriate for young children and is an entry in this years Christian Developers Network Speedgame Event.

This is the first in a series of articles on writing crossplatform applications with C++. These articles will be based on the premise that strict adherence to standard C++ will result in extremely portable code which will run on almost every platform available, including embedded systems.

However, limiting yourself to strict C++ also means limiting yourself to the standard C++ libraries, which only cover basic file and console input and output. That means no graphical user interfaces.

Pass by iterator is not a new concept, but one that we are going to perhaps give a new name to today and propose as a standard for normal usage.

If you take for example the normal way of passing around standard containers:

The idea of "Pass By Iterator" that we are proposing involves never again writing code like the above.

Ex Astris 2008-05-15 snapshot is now available.

The economy was corrected from the previous release. A simple supply/demand model is used for determining the value of goods and the price is then negotiated based on the player's "Negotiation" skill.

Also, there are Ubuntu and MacOS binaries available for download with this release.

Ex Astris 2008-05-15 snapshot is now available.

There are many changes to the organization of the code to make it a little more maintainable as well as basic game play features added including warping between planets and buying and selling of goods and refueling your vehicle.

We've now completed 5 articles in the "Nobody Understands C++" series so here we are going to recap the misconceptions we have covered.

1. You shouldn't use all the language features of C++, that just makes your code too complicated! Wrong, we learned that by using some of the less used features of C++ we can make our code much more succinct.