This is a followup to David’s earlier post.
David and I were roommates in college so during his initial development of Crown and Cutlass, I was often the first tester of his new code. Generally that consisted of me sailing around and saying things like, “Where are the pirates? Why does the ship look so crappy? Why does your game suck so much?” Clearly very helpful.
Early on, I did a Windows port from David’s code because I wasn’t running Linux at the time. That was the beginning of any ideas about cross platform concerns. That has since become something that we’ve valued, although it’s often a hassle. I didn’t do any coding in those early days.
Once David setup the Sourceforge project, I became more involved. My initial interest was in the GUI system. At first, I wrote something of a custom solution, which for how simple it was, worked remarkably well. The problem was that it wasn’t reusable, so there ended up being lots of duplicate code, and it basically looked like crap. So we moved to Guichan, which did a nice job for the small things we asked of it. Since we’re doing a rewrite, and OGRE works so nicely with CEGUI, and Guichan is still in beta, we’re moving away from it.
David and I are often motivated by different things when it comes to C and C. David does things because it’s cool, and he’ll work for lots of hours to get the waves to look the way he’d like. I, on the other hand, want to have something to show for my work. I often focus on what will result from the work. I want a finished game that you can play, and while that’s David’s ultimate goal, he looks at the project as more of a sandbox where he can try out new ideas.
Because of the nature of a project like this, there may never be any final or finished version of Crown and Cutlass. And while in some ways, that’s disappointing, it also leaves room for lots of growth and experimentation, which is really exciting. As we go forward, it would be great if more people were able to become more involved in the project. We’ve setup a wiki (which is in disarray right now) to show our design decisions as well as what we’re working on. It’s a good way to see how the game and the new engine are setup. Since we’re doing a rewrite, the code is very new and not tested very well. Also there are many items on our to do list. So there is no better time to get into the code. If you’re interested check out the wiki and see if something interests you. Or check the Protocce code out of Sourceforge and build it. Run the unit tests and read the code to see how different systems work. If there’s something you’d like to work on, send David or me a note letting us know what your plan is. Then submit a patch.
I’m excited about the future of Crown and Cutlass. I hope lots of people become involved beyond just trying the game out. If you’re interested, or just want to chat, drop us a line: collin AT This Domain, or dthulson AT This Domain. Hope to hear from you soon.