Axis: a game development and deployment system.

[pmelo86]

Hi there, i'm thinking about starting a "little" big project. It's called "Axis". I think it's easier to explaing it as a F.A.Q.
Any further ideia is welcome.

What is Axis?

Axis is a cross-platform game development and deployment system. It's based on the concept of "write once, compile, deploy and run everywhere".

What is the Axis goal?

Axis aims to deliver an environment where any individual can write a game code just once and compile it for any platform avaiable without modifying the code or carying about the underlying operating system.

How will Axis accomplish that?

The principle is simple: to create a "layer" that abstracts the game code from the system code, leaving for the game developer just functions related to the game itself.

Isn't it a little like SDL?

Axis might sound like SDL, but the ideia is to provide a full game development environment (including an IDE). SDL just provides the ability to write cross-platform code.

As an example, if you write a SDL code it will compile on different platforms with no problems, but generally the developer needs to deal with different toolchains. Axis wants to close this gap, the developer SHOULD have a easy way to compile his game on any platform without hassle.

The motto of the project is "An F9 should be necessary to compile a game on any system."

[TheAncientGoat]

So, slightly like Gluon / Scirra Construct?

What language are you planning on using? Are you focusing on 2d/3d? Have you started writing any code?

[qubodup]

This thread is missing link and license info

[charlie]

Also some links to example games...

[dusted]

Sounds like a very large task, consider building upon SDL, that is, get the choolchain/IDE thing working, as that's really what's missing from SDL.
That way you won't need to invent the wheel again.
That also saves programmers from having to learn another API.

[pmelo86]

Hello everyone.

TheAncientGoat, I didn't know the softwares you pointed out. I quick looked at their sites and I think they are a different idea. For me, it seems they are more game creators than an environment on which the developer could easly program it's own games (in C++, for example).

There are a lot of game creators out there, if the way I explained sounded like I wanted to create another one sorry, I'll try to explain better:

Taking Microsoft's XNA as an example, AFAIK if you write a game using it you can build it and deploy it on Windows and on the Xbox (correct if I'm wrong ). But, still, it has just the DirectX low level API exposed to the developer, if the developer want's to create a game he needs to use a DirectX based game engine ou create his own.

I've tried to write some games or even a basic game engine from scratch using OpenGL (just as a hobby and learning experience) and the thing I was missing was an easy way to integrate everything: write, build, deploy and run with simple steps. I choose to use gcc on linux as my toolchain, but I think this is one part of the proccess that could be abstracted from the developer.

In the proccess of this learning experince I reached a point where I was more focused on selecting "the best" toolchain/ide/library that could fit my needs than actually creating something. So I thought: "ok, what if I had it all in one place? code editor, tool chain integrated and when I pressed F9 the game just got compiled and a binary poped up in my source folder? and what if I did that on any platform without changing the source code?"

Reggarding the technology, I'm thinking of using C++, as it was the language I was learning in the process, and about 2d or 3d, as the primary ideia is to have a complete game environment I'm talking about 2d, 3d, vfs, networking, audio and etc.

I wrote some learning code for basic OpenGL.

qubodup and charlie, do I need to post legal information or links? I wasn't aware of that, as it's just an ideia I thought it wasn't necessary.

dusted, yes! I know thats a very large task, thats why I put " "little" big project" on the first post. And that's why I'm posting here, I know its not a one man army battle.
Regarding the reinventing the wheel... SDL is good, but it's just an API and I'm planning to make an ide with an engine integrated. Maybe we could use some code (I'm not sure if we can do that) or ideas from SDL, we don't need to write everything from scratch. We could even blend another open source technologies.

But I think that if we can reduce the number of dependencies that the developer/game will have, this will make the deployment part easier.

This weekend I'll draw some schemes on how I think things could be done (the IDE, the Engine, the Deployment, etc) and post it here.

[pmelo86]

Hi again, I just remembered a good example of what I'm talking about: Lazarus (http://lazarus.freepascal.org). It's an cross-platform Delphi-like RAD.

The concecpt of the VLC is great. The developer doesn't need to know the target system's calls to build it's applications, they are all abstracted by components. And generally the developer doesn't need to change not even one line of code to build it on another platform.

As I've said before, it's a matter of pressing a F9 to get it ready to run.

The thing is that it's a general purpose RAD, my idea is to create one specific for games.

See ya!

[andrewj]

ClanLib might be a similar goal, a cross-platform set of libraries for developing games with.

[Sauer2]

Why not create a good Lazarus configuration for allegro.pas?
http://allegro-pas.sourceforge.net/
You wouldn't need to reinvent the wheels.