Sunday 5 October 2014

Awakener ... again

Several years ago I ported Ben Chandler's Awakener to XAGE.  Although it was fully playable, during development I was increasingly unhappy with what was under the hood.  I've blogged infrequently about the improvements that have been made to the engine since, but here's a concise comparison:
  1. Scripting is now handled in pure C# rather than an XML-based scripting language.  Protobuild is used to synchronise XAGE Editor with automatically created Visual Studio solutions.
  2. On Windows, the dependencies on Microsoft .NET and XNA have been removed by using mono & Ethan Lee's Monogame fork, FNA, along with cygwin & mkbundle to produce a standalone executable.
  3. Pathfinding is much improved with the old walkboxes replaced with floor polygons.
  4. There are now three interchangeable input methods - mouse, controller & touch.
  5. The new SDL2-based backend allows for fully resizable windows and different scaling modes. 
The Awakener UI has also been tweaked to incorporate some lessons learnt with Ortis.  Try for yourself:
I've also uploaded a short youtube video to showcase some of the above features:  http://youtu.be/enFbfhqluJU (ProTip:  Don't record videos at 1AM with a poor quality headset).