I’ve been thinking a little bit about the various different things I shouldn’t take on by myself for Holochrist development. If I want to release within a reasonable timespan and have a polished product. I want to release around the time I graduate from highschool(about one and a half year away from now). Keep in mind that’s only an unrealistic estimate.

I’ve thought hard about which pre-existing libraries to use, and I think I’ve been able to narrow down the best ones. And they are all Open Source! (Kind of)

Without further ado, here they are:

• Ogre3d
• Bullet
• OpenAL (hold your horses)

Ogre

I’ve actually considered Ogre for Holochrist a few times already. The only thing that’s been holding me back is the fact that I am so incredibly interested in the rendering subject, I just want to do it all on my own you know? Anyhow, Ogre gives me everything I need; and saves me a tremendous amount of development time I can spend on polishing the game. And to be brutally honest, I’m not ready to tackle the graphics on my own yet.

I will probably learn quite a bit about graphics using Ogre anyways, so hey! What the hell!


Ogre renders some damn fine stuff eh?

Bullet

What’s there to say really? Bullet Physics are some of the greatest out there. And they are not just used in gaming. If I’m not mistaken, Inception (or some other movie) used it during the production; which really says a lot.

The hardest part will probably be figuring out how to bake a physics simulation. If I can do that somehow, I can bring to life one of the most memorable set-pieces I have planned for the game. So I really hope I can do it.


OpenAL

Or at least some form of OpenAL. OpenAL itself isn’t actually open source(although free), but there are open source implementations like OpenAL Soft. Writing sound from scratch is something I’ll probably never do for a game, and OpenAL seems pretty powerful indeed. Much like OpenGL.

Sorry for the lack of polish in this post. It is 4am and I am writing this for the third time. This time in a text editor because of fucking tumblr.

I’m glad I can have these powerful libraries at hand when making this game. Because there’s is still so much I have to do. Not only do I have to glue everything together in C++. I have to make a ton of 3d Assets, Music and sound effects, Write a nice script and find a good voice actor to read it; and polish it into a scary game. And deal with every other problem. I’m starting to wonder if the development will be more scary than the game itself. All I know is that I will not stop until it is done. And worthy of release.

Thank you for reading.