Far Cry's crygame.dll - the comstock load for all the game logic in
Far Cry - has come into focus for the C&C Far Cry
project. FINALLY. The tears you see: they are
real. It's taken me awhile to get my composure straightened
out. I'm sooo happy. *gasps for air*
Give me a minute... talks amongst yourselves.
Ok,
back to reality. Pardon the stupidity of that opening.
Being a software engineer (just half a year shy of receiving my
bachelors of science) I am most comfortable in the C++ programming
language. I can solve any problem, write any rule, and do it very
lean and fast. What that means for you is a better game in a
shorter amount of time. Up until now, all of our code has been
situated on the Lua (an external scripting language comparable to mIRC
scripting only a lot more open ended) for several reasons, namely to
speed up development and to have the code out in the open for others to
build off of and modify. For us, having a strong mod community is
important, and Lua lets us build a strong game that at the same time is
very accessible for you to build a strong mod.
Now just
because we're migrating some of our code into C++ does not mean we are
compromising our principles. It means just the opposite.
Our intentions are to hide only the nitty-gritty details that are heavy
in math and computational paradigms. We can speed up these items,
making the game faster and overall better for you. With access to
the net code, rendering methods, and script objects, we can improve the
performance of the game while also putting newer items into Lua that
you - the modder - can use. Items which would otherwise be
totally inaccessible for the average mod team.
For example: Far
Cry has no actual tanks anywhere within the shipped version of the
game. They are not part of the game. They are in C&C Far
Cry. Because of this, turrets on vehicles update their
orientations unrealisticly when compared to how a tank works.
Where ever you look, that is where your turret points. By gaining
access to the DLL, we will be able to implant a capped movement speed
on turrets, forcing them to move towards where you are looking at at a
defined speed, making it look and feel more realistic. We - and
by that includes you - would not have been able to do this from the
available resources in the Lua environment for this game. What we
will do besides add this ability is also extract the speed setting for
a turret on a vehicle to the Lua script for that vehicle, enabling you
to define this max speed from inside the Lua script. Now
something that you couldn't do can now be done very, very easily.
It's 3 in the morning. Cut me some slack here.
Over
the holiday period, we will be porting a lot of foundation code into
the DLL and perform some clean up in our Lua stock code. Some
core features - like the one mentioned above - are also planned.
C&C FarCry is going to prove to be a testing ground for some of the
concepts we have in mind for C&C: The Dead 6. There are going
to be some pretty exciting things going on in the next few months, so
stick around.