Topic: Plugins

Ok, the plugin system isn't "live" as such. I can provide the source code for anyone interested to get it to work so far, until we wait for the ok to get it on svn and then into the next release.

Still, I've been working on a couple of things with regards to plugins, mainly as investigations as to what I can (easily) do for my game. Nothing is in any way complete, or even usable (the particle system doesn't even run yet) but I've started documenting things on my website. It would be great to get some feedback as I go along, if anyone would have time to do so.

I do have to stress that, as well as a full time programming job, I now have several things "on the go". There is my game, the 3 plugins I have and a GUI system. I'm also being two people to make small 2D games for them. No rest for the wicked. Oh, and there's the tutorial series. As such, I wouldn't expect any of these projects to be speeding ahead at a phenomenal pace, however, as they are all related to the progress of my game, they will get developed slowly. I will put what I do on github and document things in code and on my site so people can see what's happening.

Anyway, time to drop a couple of links
MLove - integration of Löve2D with Maratis - No Github
Gooey - data driven GUI system for Love/MLove - Github
MParticle - integration of Particle System - Github
MProfiler - Maratis CPU/memory profiler plugin - Github

Last edited by Nistur (2012-03-28 22:41:28)

Re: Plugins

I thought it might be worth putting down a few examples for other people to consider. I wish I could devote time and commit to developing all of them, but hopefully if we throw some ideas around, someone will see something that they like and put their name in for something.

I don't mean for there to be any pressure at all, in fact, it's probably just as worthwhile people saying "I would really like to see a plugin with X" than saying that they will look into one or another of them. That way, there can be a discussion about what things can work and what are entirely infeasible.

I have a few things I would like to start off with RE. the plugins. The first is, something that Anael mentioned is that iOS wouldn't support plugins as they can't have dynamic libraries. I think it would be beneficial to decide early on a framework by which we can have both static and dynamic libraries as plugins. Secondly, something I recently stumbled across that people might find interesting. Volumes Of Fun are a dutch indie game dev studio, but they've made a voxel engine library which might be nice to plug into Maratis. People like voxels tongue Also, slightly more unrealistic, but I would love one of these headsets. I think it would be great to have a brain controlled Maratis game wink One final thing which I think Maratis would really benefit from, but is probably too heavy for the main game engine is a more comprehensive plugin manager, handling updates and "installing" plugins to game projects.

Anyway, hope to get some more feedback, and hope we can get the plugin system submitted and running soon so we can start making some great plugins to go with this great engine smile

Re: Plugins

Having had a couple of issues with rendering some videos with Blender to look right, I have had a thought for another potential plugin that shouldn't be _too_ hard to do.

MVideoDirector!

I think, the most basic thing that can be done for this is that we can set up a scene in Maratis with camera pans etc, test it by running the game. We can add a behaviour to the camera which does nothing much, and just has a single boolean for recording... The (custom) MGame instance can then check for this behaviour on the current camera, check the variable, and then either do normal drawing, (and?/)or render to video.

I'm not sure whether there would be any issues with the draw taking too long. I know Maratis logic is locked to 60fps, but we would really need rendering to a stable framerate (well, to be syncronised with logic, so even if a frame takes 1s, it still thinks of it as 1/60)

Anyway, this was just a thought I had, I'm definitely not going to be picking it up now. I just thought I'd mention to see what people thing