Niven|FSG started

Yeah, people, finally Niven|FSG went into development! Be sure to read on to be the first who knows about it :)

What is Niven|FSG

Niven|FSG is the codename for a game being developed by a friend of mine and me using the Niven engine. We’re gonna build Niven around this game, so the first edition of Niven won’t be a general-purpose 3D engine (hence we call it Niven|FSG :)). The next iteration after this game will be surely much more generic than Niven|FSG, but we don’t want to spend too much time in making Niven a generic game engine and rather push the game out of the door.

FSG?!?

FSG is a game, with so unique and innovative gameplay I can’t find words to describe it. Really, I can’t! We expect the first beta version to be ready around late summer 2006. The game is gonna work under Windows and probably Linux, if we find someone who can port a bit of the low-level OS specific stuff to that platform. Don’t hope that we’ll support Mac OS X, BeOS or WTF-OS, we won’t do that! (Except of course you break our EULA, decompile the game and port it the hard way with assembler only. If you manage to do that, we won’t even sue you for decompiling :)). The rest is written in ISO conformant C++, so it should cause no porting problems. The 3D API will be OpenGL (suprising, isn’t it?).

The current state of development is that we’ve got some core stuff running, but we’ve got nothing you could look at (despite my .obj file loader which will be replaced by a COLLADA mesh loader as soon as the COLLADA 1.4 specification is out). The complete source is around 200 kb now, as soon as I get some LoC-Counting tool that works under Windows I’ll add some counter that shows the development status. Anyway, I’m gonna release from time to time the commit counts so you can always see how busy we are ;).