Dear players,
This dev log will be very technical. I try to express my work in a way that is understandable for non-sofware developers, but please excuse me, if I fail doing so.
As I announced in the last major update, I am currently putting a lot of work into the game engine. If you read previous dev logs, you know that I started creating a custom game engine for all my projects six years ago and it grows with my games that I develop. I started the developing in C# with .NET Framework 4.5.2 back in 2015 and since then the .NET technology has evolved. It spawned .NET Standard, then .NET Core and now everything is united in just .NET 5 (6 is coming soon). I wanted to take the opportunity to migrate my game engine and all my tools and games that I've written from .NET Framework to .NET 5 but that brought some additional work with it. I am using only very external components, because I want to be as flexible as possible and I also don't want to dependent on other teams. However, one of the few components that I use is called SharpDX. This component serves as a sort of bridge between DirectX and the programming language C#. It had regular updates when I started my game engine in 2015, but its developer abandoned the project two years ago. This meant no further improvements and there is no alternative to it that I am aware of. This meant that I not only had to migrate my own game engine to .NET 5, but also SharpDX. I successfully completed this task, but it took me quite some time!
While the previously mentioned work has no direct result on you as players, it makes the game engine more future-proof at enables other work that wasn't previously possible. For instance, I wrote my own math modules for anything related to linear algebra (matrices, vectory, topology, etc.). SharpDX has its own math components and I currently have to convert my math objects into theirs and vice versa several hundred times a second. This takes quite some computing time which is painful for older computers. Since SharpDX is now compiled by me and it was abandoned by its original developer I will remove its math modules and use my own math modules inside SharpDX. This is totally fine with SharpDX's licence, so I don't violate anything. It removes all these conversions between SharpDX and my math objects which should make the more smooth for players with older computers.
Another thing I was working on - and still work on - is support for more file types. This affects modders who will be able to not only load 3D models in FBX file format, but also in Wavefront's OBJ, Maya's 3DS, STL and more file types. It will also make it easier for me to load more content into the game and providing more planet stuff for you!
Next week, I will try to complete the math work I mentioned above. The week after that, I will be away for a week and then I will work on the file formats.
