Over the last few months, a fair amount of work has gone into developing the TimberWolf game engine to be easy to install and work with. One of the major milestones of the engine has finally been reached: the engine can now be compiled as a shared library. So in a sense, “The Road to 1.0” begins right now.
The code can be downloaded and compiled from the GitHub repository.
In the near future, I’m going to be working on a lot of the graphics code, and integrating it with Bullet for physics calculations. I’m also going to be porting all of the changes over to the companion engines ArcticWolf and RedWolf as I go along.
ArcticWolf will likely be in use once again for Ludum Dare 41 here in a week, which will help battle-test the code, and the results of that will end up being ported back into the others.
TimberWolf will be evolving alongside development to the game Territory shortly thereafter. The game has not seen much development outside of some basic testing, but seeing as the engine is at the point where it’s ready for graphics code, the next step will be to get the basic skeleton of the game up and running.
Once I’m able to get a working 3D game concept in Territory, then I’ll begin the release cycle for Territory. I’ll be starting with 0.1, and I will be following the rules of Semantic Versioning. This means that anything in the 0.x release cycle will make no promises in terms of API stability.
Finally, at my discretion, when the engine seems to have a relatively stable API and there are no pending improvements to the design, then I’ll release 1.0. That will also make the promises of semantic versioning, and it will be safe for use in production code for games.
Somewhere along the line, I’m thinking of integrating some Rust code into the native engines, most likely TimberWolf. At some point, I think it will be possible to have the core code of TimberWolf written in Rust and implementing an API in both Rust and C++. It’s also possible that yet another variation of the engine will be created for a pure-rust implementation. This is not final, however, and might get scrapped.
