If you nip over to my portfolio section, you’ll see a link to my old University project, PP++. Essentially, it’s a framework for developing games. When I set out to do it, it had grand plans of being totally plug-in centric and cross platform, but that somewhat fell apart when you bring in all the usual overhead of a university project.
So, is it dead? Yes, and no 🙂 In it’s current state, I don’t intend to move forward with it. It was developed to meet the goals of the time (and to fit in a 8 month time-frame of iterative development and user-testing). As such, it has many ‘by-design’ short comings to help round things off in the time available.
The short-list of features to be added is:
- Proper Plug-in based architecture
- Abstract Graphics and Audio devices into their own plug-ins
- Implement alternative Graphics device (likely DX10 support)
- Move all resource loading to plugi-ins
- Config/Ini file reader/caching mechanism, to allow for simpler break between config and code
- Change threading mechanisms to boost::threads for (later) cross platform support
- Remove Win32 specific UI/Window management code, replace with cross platform alternative (Qt/WxWidgets are on the cards at the moment)
- Migrate the project to VS2010 so I can use some of the new C++0x features
- Replace resource streaming system with a more robust alternative
That’s my somewhat ambitious shortlist, but covers the most important architectural changes that are needed to make PP++ more than a University project 🙂
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