I will be beginning work on a master's degree beginning in August of 2008. For my thesis, I am going to use Irrlicht and DustyEngine in an artificial intelligence simulation.

For this reason I am going to update Dusty Engine to work with Irrlicht 1.4 Beta (I have not tried the combination yet...) So look forward to version 9-2 soon!

Due to problems people are having compiling applications using Dusty Engine release 9 and Irrlicht 1.3, I have released version 9-1 of Dusty Engine. This is simply a recompilation of the dusty dll that I have verified works with Irrlicht 1.3 in Dev-C++, Visual Studio and Linux.

As much as it pains me to talk about, I'm afraid that Dusty, my dog for whom this project is named, has passed away. He was very old for a sheltie, almost 14 years. He has been buried in the backyard of my house--where he spent a large potion of his life--in his favorite spot under a large oak tree.

Please remember him, and may this project be his memorial.
A Picture of Dusty

Dusty Engine 10 is about to enter the testing phase. I have completed breaking the engine down into two separate libraries.

DustyEngineBase. This library is separate from irrlicht, and includes all of the dusty engine task logic and abilities. I wanted to separate the two so that Dusty could be used for other library like SDL. I still will use Irrlicht for all my development, and am still an avid Irrlicht fan.

DustyEngineIrr. This is all the tasks in the current engine which rely upon Irrlicht. They will remain unchanged for the large part.

Yes, this will mean you must link with two DLLs. But I think it's a better solution in the end.

I've been hearing reports of some compatibility problems between Dusty 9 and Irrlicht 1.1/1.2. I am going to be looking into these, and will release an updated binary.

So far, it looks like just re-compiling the DustyEngine DLL file will fix the problem.

These past few months have been a blur.

Oct 13: Started new job
Oct 21: Moved into my first apartment
Oct 29: Got MARRIED!

So I have a lot to get used to :) Dusty development has dragged down a bit due to all the above. Kind of on the backburner at the moment. But not forgotten!

Hold true!

I am wanting to port the next version of Dusty Engine to C#. As for version 9, Osirus has completed ported Dusty Engine 9 to C# already. Get it at the Lair of Osirus: Here

I have decided to make some pretty major changes for release 10. First of all, Dusty Engine will be separated into two libraries. There will be a DustyEngine Base library, which contains all non-Irrlicht stuff. Then there will be a DustyEngine Irrlicht library, which ties in the engine with Irrlicht.

The engine will also be using the Yasper library for smart pointers, getting away from Irrlicht reference counting.

The reason for this is simple: I want to use DE for other projects that are non-Irrlicht, and many people have asked for such abilities. I want to be able to use DE in an SDL project, for instance.

In this case, I would not want to have to link in with Irrlicht to compile the program. So, all Irrlicht capabilities will still exist, they will just exist as an Irrlicht library. If you want to write an Irrlicht program with DustyEngine, just link in with the Irrlicht library as well as the base library.

Once that is complete, I will be beginning a complete port of Dusty Engine to C#, to be developed alongside the C++ code.

There is no problem using Irrlicht, I still want to use Irrlicht for everything. But I have some other projects that I would like to use DE's capabilities with, and linking with Irrlicht is not an option.

There has not been an update here in a while, as I am in my final semester of school at MTSU. Soon I will have a shiny new degree in computer science! :)

But work on DE has not stagnated. After piddling around a bit with GameMonkey scripting language, I have directed my focus towards created a scripting language for games.

This language will be called DEScript, and will wrap around Irrlicht and DustyEngine.

I will release more information as it progresses.

I've put up the documentation for release 9, a little belated, I apologize. It's up now!