Lumina, a game engine for GP2x and Pandora

Info:

News:

Ever since the Pandora Rebirth compo was announced I've been concentrating on the new game project, tentatively named Space Dog, in order to submit it as a demo to the compo.
Most engine changes and improvements has therefor been directed toward the platform type of game.
The most significant change is that every object now takes care of itself to a very high degree.
This means that there is almost no difference between a player object and a static object, this simplifies AI controlled objects a great deal.
Another important change is that object collision is now done locally by the objects instead of globally by the scene.

Since I'm making this game for the Pandora Rebirth compo, it's tailored toward the Pandora, tough I am still trying to make sure it will run on the GP2x.
I have also started to bake in a bit of support for the WIZ and the Cannoo, Dingoo support might be coming too.

I have recently gotten a bit sidetracked by yet another game project these past month's.
While the rate of development is rather slow it's steady.
Some specific engine changes for this new game has been added, and the other two games are being updated to make use of them.
Among these changes are 22.5 degree slopes, height based falling and jumping animation and some script changes.

Olds:

Well, the site is back.
I had a hard-drive crash during a backup session and the site, most project files along with the backup got corrupted, fun times.
Development has continued, but I didn't feel any specific need for a site for it.
Until today, when i found an even older version of this site when going trough some old usb sticks, so I thought, "Why not?".

So, what has been happening with the games I was working on?
Well, as I stated above I have been working on it every now and then.
The major changes have happened in the engine, but where there before was test-maps for the games, there is now actual levels with the beginnings of the story and such.

The major changes in the engine are; 
* Basic network support
* Rewrite of the script system to allow for basic flow control (IF statements and such)
* Customizable gravity for platform games.
* Script templates
* sound management
* 45Degree slope support

Really Olds:

The last three days have been full of progress for the engine and the editor.
One of the largest steps forward is that I managed to kick some life into my gp2x.
The stick is however, busted, so I cant really test movement and object script interaction.
By doing that, I could now test how Lumina preformed on it, it was a wonderful surprise.
It far exceeded my expectations at 240fps with 24 object's on screen and all of them running a highly unoptimized script. 
The second largest step is that the editor, the main thing is that there is no longer any need to
manually edit the map files the editor generates in order to make them work.
Other changes includes; 
Adding parameters for layer-level in the object declaration.
Adding names to templates.
Creating a prototype for the inventory.
Making some preparations for save-games.

I feel that it might be time for a public preview soon :D

HAH! i just reached a milestone (well not really) but a fun (for you at least) thing just happened.
I have been trying to track down a bug that corrupted the game script after it had been loaded for the last hour;
but i could not find what was causing it and it seemed to appeared at random.
After a while I concluded that there was something wrong with my text drawing function, since it was after a couple of
text boxes that the corruption was getting noticeable (game script started to throw a lot of "Unknown command" messages).
But i looked over the code again and again, but could not find what was wrong... until i checked my object script file.
*sigh* i had forgotten to end the line with the ';' that i use to indicate end of command.
Those extra few characters overwrote the command data, and thus the problem. 

The editor is now actually useful since i have now created a save map function.
However it still doesn't recognise custom templates, so those are lost upon saving a map that contains them.
I am thinking of removing the ability to enter custom templates into the map file itself since it's not really necessary
and the engine would be required to use more ram.
I have also fixed some small bugs relating to the tiled background collision detection and with the pixel doubling function.

It has been a long time since i updated this page, mainly because I have moved to another city.
Lumina is now at version 0.6.17, and since the last update i have added loads of features, among these are;
Object support
	*the engine can load objects.
	*the engine can load objects based on a standard template file.
	*the engine can load skeleton objects and later apply custom templates or custom objects.
	*the engine can display loaded objects.

Animation support
	*the engine loads animation data, it does however not yet use it.
	*the engine can however handle object direction changes (object faces left when "looking" left).
	*the engine can generate a type of common animation data automatically.
	
Script Support
	*the engine loads and executes the game startup script (sets first map, sets player id, and so on).
	*the engine loads but cannot yet interpret game and object script.

General engine updates
	*the used file structure is now much simpler and uses a lot less individual files.
	*the engine can now "end" a game without exiting it, this means that the script engine can change the whole game "on the fly" 
		without the player needing to exit and then reenter that area.

Old stuff