Just reminding everyone that I'm alive!
My previous journal mentioned that I wanted to take another stab at writing a Pokemon engine and I'm starting to! I've been working on a battle engine for a few months now and although it's been progressing slowly (due to me having a full time job, now), I have confidence that I can finish it. I have a solid base ready and I just need to iron it out before adding some of the more complicated moves. The goal is to have ~30
unique moves implemented by the end of December. By unique, I mean I will only implement moves that do not already share a common effect with a move I have already implemented. So far, I only have 3 moves implemented (with all the bells and whistles of a battle engine included), and I think December is a healthy and doable goal. I will release a tech demo of the battle engine in December, regardless whether or not I have reached my goal.
Also, the battle engine is programming-language-agnostic -- I guarantee that any language, engine or framework that lets you load libraries will be capable of integrating my battle engine. For those who are programmers, you may realize that this simply implies exposing a C API. And obviously, I will make this code open source so anyone can contribute to it or use it for their own purposes. I am implementing it in Rust which aims to be as fast as C++ yet designed in a way that memory leaks are not possible unless you explicitly use an "unsafe" keyword. I aim for this project to use 0 unsafe keywords so it will stable and never cause a crash.
Assuming everything goes smoothly, the plan is to have a battle engine that is easy to use, expand and integrate into Cinder & Foam by the time Cinder & Foam comes out of hiatus. I hope to share more details as it becomes available!
And yes, that means I'll be back working on Cinder & Foam! Some of you may remember me as the original programmer of Cinder & Foam back when I was working on
Pokemon 3D Engine Test for it. Although the CF team agreed
not to make a 3D game, I will happily be helping out with a nice new 2D overworld engine after the battle engine is feature complete. Great things will surely come in 2017!