WorldFoundry's target audience is now portable game machines (gameboy advance, sony playstation portable--psp), cell phones, pda's (palm, wince?), and other small-scale embedded systems. ironic; remember how we were pushing the psx and pc then?

why? WorldFoundry design constraints/... sony playstation 2mb ram, 1mb video ram; pre-processing and crunching

what parts of WorldFoundry are seperable and reusable in other projects (especially TheNebulaDevice)

also keeping in mind that much of the game will be written in the scripting language (probably [http://www.lua.org/Lua] so a lot(?) of this stuff will be (re-)coded in designated scripting language (p.s., i hate tcl)

runtime libraries [http://www.worldfoundry.org/wiki/pub/WorldFoundry/IncorporateAndReusePartsOfWorldFoundryInTheNebulaDevice/libraryhierarchyPdfLibraryhierarchyPdf] http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfsource/source/

• • • memory stuff??? (review) http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfsource/source/memory/
    • pigsys: assert (what else?/review pigsys)
    • look into anim http://worldfoundry.org/wfwiki/index.php/AnimationHandlingInWorldFoundryEngine (but more the code, really)
    • how do streams fit?
    • streaming and asset binding system. what's there and what's good?
    • channels are implemented in TheNebulaDevice. can they be improved? are there useful "library" channel function generators? what else?
      • channels are being deprecated in favor of nVariable (server)
    • MovementHandler? (move of a concept than code to copy?) what about camera handlers? http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfsource/source/movement/
    • other low-level (utility?) classes?: color, color48, dmalloc stuff? (are there better (cross-platform) options now?)
    • what about messages? (real messages--and message ports)
    • oas concept of key/value pairs (oas-like node in object hierarchy?)
    • platform-independent and identification? (especially because of porting to MacOsX?)
    • debugging tools? hdump? memory (some kind of script) mem.pl

game object classes

• • • how can these be adapated and reused?

tools http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wftools/#dirlist

• • • textile? http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wftools/textile/ (or some mostly stripped down version of it using an image loading library (like DevIL? which is what TheNebulaDevice uses, although development has stopped, and TheNebulaDevice is not against using a different, supported library)
    • chargrab might be useful in general, but not sure if i need it specifically (also use image loading library)
    • xcd http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wftools/xcd/ would be nice to have under linux
    • wfbind http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wftools/wfbind/ is cool (but didn't work under nt)

wflevels http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wflevels/

• • • .lev to nebula converter? (what exactly does that mean anyway?)
    • bubba is pretty complete (new character?) but besides velocity levels, actual levels were never really a strong point

wfmaxplugins http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfmaxplugins/

• • • attribedit (but that's not really max-specific anymore) also related to http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfi3dplugins/AttribPlugin/ and (most relevant?) http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wftools/attribedit/ but also i have a version of attribedit written in perl/gtk+
      • this deserves careful consideration as it was a cornerstone of making level designer/level layout-editable levels

production process

• • • buildmode - what parts? makefiles were hard to make and keep up-to-date (kind of). make is not really the right tool for this job (although we do generate makefiles automatically, make still sucks). buildmode concept good, customized builds (very high level concept of building, with many "switches" beneath for fine granularity and corresponding customization and configuration)

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reviewed, and tnd should be updated (not with any actual source code from WorldFoundry)

reviewed, and can use/re-use/something from these parts (roughly prioritized)

• • • math (make sure TheNebulaDevice is math complete). also maybe some other units like Revolution, Angle, Eurler, Quaternion, Plane, Point3D, Vector2, Vector3, Matrix34, etc. http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfsource/source/math/

• • • input system
      • record input and play back
        • • good for creating attract modes, and other predefined sequences.
          • also useful for debugging
            • but i think the current code still needs to be repackaged as a dervice class rather than compile-time switches in the main (game?) loop
      • also consider what other uses in a multiplayer environment
      • remapping implementation and support.
      • macro playback would be a very useful and seemingly-easy addition

• • • color cycling routines (simple code to grab, but will need to be hooked up to channels or nvariable depending)
    • profiler reporting/visualization tools
    • registry? http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfsource/source/registry/ code is useful; interface is not

reviewed, and nothing to move from wf to tnd

• • • timer (check to see for timer features to add to TheNebulaDevice) but also Clock, at a higher level http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfsource/source/timer/
    • although the iffwrite library could easily be adapted to simple xml files, a more xml-specific, and "standard" library seems like a better choice. also, what's going to be stored as xml data and what's going to be stored as tcl (or lua or whatever) scripts? xml might primarily be relevant to the backend, internet, database programs.
    • compare particle system http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wf-gdk/wfsource/source/particle/ to TheNebulaDevice (add features to TheNebulaDevice?)
    • hiscore table stuff? (probably not)
    • audiofmt is (just) sox
    • sound was never completed in wf
      • i think all of the sound, sound effects, music, midi, etc. interfaces should be deleted as well as all code referncing it. not only should the interface be re-evaluated (if there ever really was an interface, anyway--it was mostly just hacked in for a demo), but integrating sound today would use very different libraries (which were all win32 api-specific, anyway)
      • cvs history can still resurrect the code, if necessary (highly unlikely). morever, should WorldFoundry need sound and music, a cross-platform solution like http://www.openal.org/ should be used.

-- WillNorris - 29 May 2003