What!? Again!! YES! We started porting the “old” engine from Delphi to C#. The reason is that we’re porting the engine is to cut down development time. Also with the whole .NET framework and CLR less work is needed to achieve more. The architecture of the engine remains basically the same.  Apart from some changes at least I’m quiet happy with the design.

Why .NET and not C++ or brainfuck? Well… C++ would take a lot more development time for me as we are more experienced in C# that C++. Speed is not really an issue with simple games as you have a shit load of processing power under your fingertips. And it that’s not enough, you still have the GPU!

Also an other thing that pulled me over the line is Mono. With mono you can run .NET CLR applications (written in C#, managed C++, VB.NET, etc) cross platform. The supported that took my interest are Sony PS3 and the Nintendo Wii. Also I tested it on Suse 11.2 (Linux) with a demo application and it runs with without a problem. The only thing we need to do is keep the engine mono-compatible.

For Windows I want to use the .NET framework and DirectX 9 and 11 (soon). For the other platforms I need to make a new renderer in OpenTK or something similair. Also I need to switch to a mono-compatible physics engine. I’m thinking on BulletX (Bullet for C#) as it’s open source.

The current status of the engine is that I setup DirectX 9 and can render models and a simple GUI all with shader model 3.0 which is also the minimum I want to use. Also I modified the material system to be more easy to use and has less overhead. Further more the editor will be less advanced and used for basic operations like adding and moving objects on the screen. Also the editor is now in-game so we have only 1 executable. (apart from 32 bit and 64 bit).

Stay tuned as more updates will follow!