fiber-optic megawatts

SFII90 - C++ and Ruby Video Game Engine

My name is Phillip Weisberg and I’m a software developer in the Washington, D.C. area.  Welcome to fiber-optic megawatts!  This blog will focus mainly upon video games - from reviews through development and anything else along the way.  Today’s topic is SFII90 - a free video game engine that I developed in C++ and Ruby and licensed under the GNU LGPL 2.1.  Before I jump too far ahead, let me first give you a little background about myself and the how the engine came to be.

I’ve always been interested in designing and producing video games.  I made a few demos in 2005, but I wasn’t satisfied with how horribly inefficient they were; There was almost no reusable code nor consistent design from game to game.  I looked at the top ten or twenty engines available for hobbyists and for some reason or another was not satisfied with any of them.  I thought it might be a good idea to create my own video game engine (despite some foreboding comments on www.gamedev.net), so I started by designing a small system that could draw sprites from bitmap files and load OGG Vorbis files.  It was… better, but still not very good. (more…)