First off, I'm a new user here - I've been to Shmups waaay back in the day, but I didn't even realize a dev forum was here - would've come in handy throughout the development of the engine so far. Oh well - now that it's here, I'll be using it.
The engine I'm developing is tentatively titled the XType engine. Heavily influenced by Gradius and Einhander - for my money, two of the greats in the side-scroller world, the engine is full 3D, and primarily works from a side view perspective, swinging the camera around as need be for cinematic reasons.
I'm developing it entirely in Managed C# for DirectX 9, using Lightwave 3D 8.0 to create my meshes [with a plugin for .X mesh export]. I'm using Photoshop CS to do my textures.
It's entirely from scratch, and considering I knew only a little Direct3D [woohoo, I can draw flat triangles and make them spin!] before going in.. it's been quite the learning experience. Thankfully, I've got a strong background in C# and ASP.NET C#, so that aspect wasn't too bad.
Here's what's done:
- Scrolling system [timing, etc]
- Player class, terrain class, background class
- Mesh loading and parsing for the classes
What's partially done:
- Weapons, need to put more in than just your plain-vanilla bullet!
- Terrain, need to work on loading routines, killin' my framerate right now!
- The mesh loading needs to be expanded to support animated meshes
- ... and I need to expand the classes to support manipulating the animations
What's not there yet:
- Collision detection
- Joystick input
- Sound
- Enemies, and their AI [shouldn't be that hard, for a sidescrolling shmup]
- Gradius style powerup system
- Dedicated camera class
- UI overlay
- Title screen / weapon selection screen / etc
- Lots, and lots, of stuff.
Anyhow, I'll be posting more later as to my progress, and of course questions along the way.
