Hey let's do this!

General discussions about Genesis3D
quake2
Posts: 1
Joined: 2019-11-11 12:27:37

Hey let's do this!

Post by quake2 » 2019-11-12 09:36:54

Hi everyone!
Long time Genesis3D user here. I started my career in software development because I wanted to create games, and my best memories are from the time when I was learning how to write in C using this engine :D Almost 20 years ago now...Life moved on and in the end I did not make it into professional game development, except for a brief stint at a major game studio, but then I decided to do different things.

However, still my best memories are from this engine, the way everything was so simple and well documented. Moreover, it was complete: you had graphics engine, physics engine, virtual file system, level editor (the great GEdit and later vxedit), animation support, everything! It was a very good self-contained development environment for its time and I really loved it.

I'd really like to help, I have a lot of experience in multiplatform development (Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS, Android), low-level system stuff, 3d/math/sound, Qt, graphics API (OpenGL and some Vulkan mostly, but I can adapt to DirectX11/12, even though I do not like it that much).
I don't have a huge amount of spare time to dedicate, but I'd like to help if possible.

What's the current status? Everything is starting from scratch? Who holds the copyright on Genesis3D name? Will it be possible to put back the epic animation that started everytime the engine loaded :D ?

Come on, let's do this! :D It would be really awesome if we could bring back this epic open-source project.

Orf
Site Admin
Posts: 16
Joined: 2019-02-16 18:47:22

Re: Hey let's do this!

Post by Orf » 2019-11-13 17:20:23

This is the kind of enthusiasm I'm looking for!

Much like yourself it's the "finding the free time" part that's keeping me from progressing as much as I'd like.

The plan is simple:
1: Finish the overhaul of the website
2: Move web hosting companies to one that supports running a node.js app as the backend for the webpage
3: Toss up an outline of what we're going to be making
4 & 5: Find people to help make it and get going

Part 1 is getting close to being done; I'm trying to write a new online documentation system using the old engine doc content as filler so I can see how things look. It looks great imho, just a few more things to do there. I was up till 3am Sat night plowing through the bugs and got a lot done.

The new api doc system will support multiple projects, multiple versions, "documents" that are uploaded in addition to the api reference, it will have support for English, French, German, Russian, and Chinese, and will have support for syntax listing in C, C++, C#, Python, Lua, and Javscript. Attached are some screenshots of that.
main.jpg
main.jpg (221.59 KiB) Viewed 18659 times
api_docs.jpg
api_docs.jpg (229.87 KiB) Viewed 18659 times
Currently I'm editing the database directly to input data. It would be nice to have some command line node.js script that parses the code and pulls out api docs in the comments or at least have an edit page on the site, especially to actually support different languages but I just want to get things up and running right now. The goal there is to be able to document what we're making and give people a sense of direction instead of having people just spewing out random code and not reaching the end goal. So that's coming soon... I think it's real close, and once done we can kinda get this thing started!

-Orf

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Akiko
Posts: 5
Joined: 2019-09-26 14:58:51
Location: Terra
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Re: Hey let's do this!

Post by Akiko » 2019-11-16 07:56:20

I'm also here to help. I usually teach C++20 using all the new fancy stuff like concepts or tbb (thread building blocks, C++17 parallel algorithms) and how to create everything without depending on third party stuff. I basically write everything from scratch. For example right now I'm writing a quite fast rasterizer. I also used Qt a lot (started with Qt 2), but stopped using it, because it became bloatware. Now I use the Nana C++ framework which is meant for static linking and is basically GUI-only.
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