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User Forums \ StarAeritha Productions \ Turtle(development name) Gaming Engine

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turtlbrdr
Marine
Posted: 2 Sep 2009
18:55 GMT
Total Posts: 39
[Copied from the presentation document]

The Turtle(development name) gaming engine is designed as a central gaming engine for games designers to program in.

Inspiration:
Turtle’s idea came from my experience mainly with Valve’s Source engine. I entertain the idea that the games basically plug into the main engine. The main engine which controls everything based on what it’s told by the scripts in the game. It allows people to program games who can’t figure out how to interface with hardware, because it’s already done by the engine. You get a few commands and the engine handles the rest. Another factor I like is that you can save a good amount of space, if you only need one engine for five games, you save a considerable amount of space compared to five engines for five games.

Platform:
Turtle is in development for the 84 series of calculators only, for now. The lack of a clock is a quirk that I, personally, do not want to tackle at this point. I may extend Turtle for the 83+se; however this issue is at this point that I have no access to one. I have no plans/intentions to port Turtle to the 83+; I cite the lack of the 15 MHz mode of its predecessors and cannot output the kind of speed Turtle will need for certain parts of its use.

Program format:
Turtle will be a flash app. The reasons being:
(a) More space to place executable code (asm programs are limited to around 8k.)
(b) Being able to run directly from archive means it won’t use up valuable ram resources
(c) It can’t be deleted by ram crashes, battery replacements, etc
(d) More control
Instead of being a standalone app, Turtle will be called from the originating program’s menu program with all of the data needed to run the game. However, it is still in development. I may make it so that calling it from the apps menu will bring up the list of currently installed Turtle-compatible games.

Features:
Because Turtle is still very early in development, many of its eventual features are unknown and not planned yet. Additionally I don’t want to add anything I won’t be to follow through with. Turtle is being developed alongside my upcoming game for the calc, which will be announced soon itself. I can promise so far that it will have a system for a real time clock and the ability to interface with the 15MHz mode on the 84+se.

Timeline:
I hope to have a testable beta done and testing around November of 2010, and to have version 1 out and on shelves by April season of 2011.

Developers will likely be able to receive a copy of the SDK about mid-January of 2011 for use in making games.

Developing Games for Turtle:
Turtle will be designed to be able to be content modular, in that if you install the Turtle engine once you will be able to play any game that is developed for it as long as you have that copy of the Turtle (of course there will be updates, but that will be dealt with in different manners). I want Turtle to be easy enough to program so the common person can learn the syntax and program at least a simple game.


Developers:
Those interested in helping to program Turtle and those interested in developing games for Turtle, should e-mail me using the included e-mail at the bottom of this page. I would appreciate it if you would include a bit on your programming experience, but if you don’t have any don’t worry too much, I just got into real programming myself. I will be making a list of exactly what needs to be done, and what could be done, soon.

Beta-testing:
While beta-testing is still a ways away I will accept applications that I can review. E-mail me as well at the e-mail included. And I will send you back an application form (a word document about a page in length). Be sure to include any document disabilities you may have (you don’t have Microsoft word), we’ll work something out. Also note that the more rep you have will place you farther up on the beta listing, but don’t let this get you down if your new to calcs, I will likely accept a lot of the people I receive apps from, most rejections will happen when I can’t reach someone when it comes time to beta test.

Contact info:
Travis
turtlbrdr@yahoo.com

Edit 9/5/09: added additional information on the timeline release schedule, pertaining to the release of the SDK.

Edit 9/14/09: added information pertaining to the release format

Edit 1/28/10: Revised timeline


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Head, and only, programmer of StarAeritha Productions
haveacalc
Guardian
avatar
Posted: 4 Sep 2009
21:40 GMT
Total Posts: 1111
An ambitious project! Good luck. If you haven't already, I would try reposting this on UnitedTI for better results.

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-quoted directly from most movies that don't exist (and some that do).
tifreak8x
Administrator
avatar
Posted: 13 Sep 2009
12:50 GMT
Total Posts: 419
your idea sounds like a good one! I built something similar, but not. It is something you adapt to serve the needs of the game itself.

And is this project going to be BASIC or ASM?

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Bringing you Pokemon, for your calculator.
turtlbrdr
Marine
Posted: 14 Sep 2009
14:58 GMT
Total Posts: 39
Asm, or rather should I say flash?

I'm thinking I'll need to put it in the flash section because,
(a) it'll be able to run without taking up valuable memory space, which means bigger maps, more sprites, more etc.
(b) the program portion can be much bigger than the 8kb limit incurred on asm programs

I edit this into my main post as well

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Head, and only, programmer of StarAeritha Productions
tifreak8x
Administrator
avatar
Posted: 15 Sep 2009
21:24 GMT
Total Posts: 419
*nods* alright, now we are getting some interesting info. =]

Good luck with programming all of it. Going to take a while if you are doing it on your own.

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Bringing you Pokemon, for your calculator.
turtlbrdr
Marine
Posted: 22 Oct 2009
07:31 GMT
Total Posts: 39
So just as a progress report, I might as well state that I've gotten next to nothing done recently. With College (to be an accountant, no less) and other stuff I just haven't put to much into it.

Also the biggest problem facing me right now is how/what to design the data files to push into the program. I need to figure out exactly what I need to pop to the local data files to be used in the engine.

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Head, and only, programmer of StarAeritha Productions
turtlbrdr
Marine
Posted: 28 Jan 2010
16:03 GMT
Total Posts: 39
Going into February, I must say that revising the timeline probably was something I should have done a long time ago. However, at this point I am now getting a better idea of how to integrate this into the calc.

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Head, and only, programmer of StarAeritha Productions
turtlbrdr
Marine
Posted: 7 Aug 2010
14:37 GMT
Total Posts: 39
Pretty much all progress has been halted on Turtle for the time being. The reason being so that we at StarAeritha Productions (aka: Me), can focus on Tortoise as our main development product. This doesn't mean that Turtle is dead. Simiarily, my game for the Turtle engine, Aerithian Adventure, is also on hold.

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Head, and only, programmer of StarAeritha Productions





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