PowerCell

PowerCell is my most recent hobby project, I'm working on it alone when I feel like it, it uses Irrlicht and FMOD.

It's meant to be a small and lightweight project, with brainstormed gameplay elements; my primary goal is to make it fun to play and replay.

PowerCell gameplay preview 1 at YouTube.

It's been a while since I uploaded this video, and since then the game hasn't seen many updates. What I've been tackling since is mainly two things, the movement system which I've been trying to get to work properly scaled by time rather than FPS, and compiling and running it in Linux.

Linux is once again my main platform at home and while compiling and running the game in Linux have been pretty straight forward, converting the content to a Linux friendly format hasn't. The main problem is that I've been using IrrEdit as my main level editor, which is only available for windows presently. The XML files saved from the editor of course can't be opened with a default text editor in gnome since it doesn't recognize the format, not a major issue since vi takes care of that, so after going over the level files and changing case sensitivity issues, paths et.c. I've run into another issue, which is with the models themselves; it seems some of them have lost polygons on the way somewhere. Most likely a normals issue.

Now I just have to find a different way of getting 3d content into PowerCell, CSG modellers have crossed my mind and even the possibility of creating my own level editor for placing elements. Though the easiest and most painless way right now seems to be a windows partition where I can still run IrrEdit.

I might have to find a willing programmer to help me with the character movement issue and possibly adding a better physics engine.

More updates to come. I'm not ready to drop this project yet, unless it starts to deviate from my main goal.