April 2006
Lots of coding recently. Maps have been imported from Liquid War 5, and some algorithmic code actually started to pour in the game. For instance, teams can be placed on a map now, and most of the memory structures necessary to handle all the game's logic are ready. While the game is still not playable, it's getting closer to being a working demo. Plans have also been made to use libcaca as a third renderer, the first being SDL/GL and the second Allegro.
March 2006
The refactoring which had been started in early 2006 is now over. The game is now much more modular, the graphical backend is loaded dynamically, and this backend itself is structured in separated components. The algorithm part, the real "core" of the game is not written yet, but a decicated module "liquidwar6ker" has been set up, which has no dependencies on any external libraries but liquidwar6sys and glibc. This should, in the long term, ease up the work of using Liquid War algorithms & structures in a completely different context.
February 2006
It's been decided to use dynamic linking through ltdl (libtool) to handle dynamic loading of graphical backends. This means that the liquidwar6 executable itself will not rely on SDL or any given graphical library. Only libliquidwar6gfx will. While this is not of immediate use since only one backend will be developped at first, it opens interesting perspectives, such as easing up a lot the process of writing an alternative backend, depending on Allegro or plain X11 or whatever is needed, should the default SDL/OpenGL not be fully adapted to one's needs. This is not commited yet, but probably be soon. Additionnally, Liquid War 6 has been tested on a big-endian machine (Apple hardware running GNU/Linux). Some patches are required (mostly linked to bitmap loading) but it basically works.
January 2006
Developpement is following its planned route. According to the "official road map" the project is on its tracks. The framework is here and works, it's possible to load a map, view it, and all this is done with a combination of scheme/C code through Guile, which is an order of magnitude cleaner than legacy Liquid War 5 code. Documentation is available on http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/manual/
December 2005
Liquid War 6 becomes a GNU package. This is great. The short term and visible impact is that the official web page for Liquid War 6 moves from http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v6 to http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6
November 2005
Nothing really new on the code side, still I decided to release some package, to save people the hassle of accessing Arch depots directly. However the package does nothing usefull for end users yet. Spent most of my coding time/energy on PyGpsWeb.
October 2005
Developpement is halted this month, will continue in November. I have other projects to finish now, which have closer deadlines than LW6 (which has none). But don't worry, developpement is now over, it's just halted for a period of a few weeks. FYI I'm concentrating on XUL and PostGIS/UMN Mapserver for now.
September 2005
Continued the work started in August. I've also fixed some stuff in the old dusty Liquid War 5 code, basically I'm preparing a 5.6.3 release which will fix some bugs, and be Allegro 4.2.0 compatible.
August 2005
Coding is on its way, I've coded a bunch of things while I was in Spain. The good news is that:
- OpenGL is rather simple to manage, I've been able to setup basic stuff quickly enough. No problem on this side.
- Guile is pretty usable, the scm_ interface lacks a good tutorial, but it's very usable. I'm still no scheme guru, but wait 8-)
Right now the current work in progress release does nothing interesting, but the framework is set up. I mean it displays stuff using OpenGL, and it's driven by scheme code which passes orders/parameters to low-level C code through Guile.
July 2005
Liquid War 6 is launched. For now it's only pure vaporware, but I have decided to devote time to it. I'm not used to drop projects, so be patient and it will be there. I've written a roadmap, which describes what I plan, and well, let's code!