What does the name "Dusty Engine" mean?
Only after completing the first release of DE did I realize that the
name "Dusty Engine" might turn some people away, as in "dusty old
engine." But the simple truth is, DE is named after my dog, Dusty.
He's a beautiful Shetland Sheepdog, and on his papers his official name is "Shiloh's Dusty Dawn."
What Is DE For?
DE is designed for game programmers who use Irrlicht and want a quick
and easy way to control many objects using minimal amounts of code. It
is inspired by the Engenuity Engine series articles by Richard Fine on
GameDev.net.
What Does DE Do?
DE allows programmers to create "tasks" which do anything the
programmer wishes them to do. The tasks are then added to a general
tree of tasks, where each task can have as many children tasks as the
designer wishes. The "grouping" of tasks allows the programmer/designer
to pause/unpause/destroy the parent task, thereby
pausing/unpausing/destroying all the children tasks, at one fell swoop.
It can be viewed similar to operating system threading program, though
it is NOT multithreaded, and is very easy to do.
As of Dusty Engine Release 8, Dusty Engine also includes an "entity" system
which allows easy control of a lot of objects on the screen at once.
What Does DE Run On?
Technically anything that Irrlicht will run on. It has been tested and
works correctly on Windows 98/2000/XP and Linux (with X). It is being
developed between a combination of g++ on Debian Linux and Visual Studio
.NET 2003 on Windows XP.
What Is DE's License?
DE is licensed under the zlib license. This means you can do ANYTHING
with the code that you see fit, except remove the original copyright
notices at the top of the source code, and if you change the code you
must make it clear that you've done so. You do not have to distribute
the source with your projects, though you may if you want. It can be
used freely in commercial and personal projects, binary or source form.
What Is DE's Release Schedule?
I am but a lowly college student, with a job :( I have to work on DE on
my own time in the few hours I have in the evening after work and
school. I will try to release new versions quickly, but it may take
weeks at a time for new releases. I will try to release top-quality,
well-tested code, so releases will add more features instead of fix
long-standing bugs. If a bug is submitted to me, it will probably be
fixed quickly.
Is There A CVS For DE?
I now use a CVS server internally for all my Dusty Engine development,
but it runs off of my little laptop. If I can procure a lasting, faster, more stable
server I may make that an option.
Are Subsequent Versions Of DE Binary Compatible?
Not at this time. Future releases of DE will not be guaranteed
backwards compatible. I will be modifying function declarations so they
take different parameters, and there may be complete rewrites of
sections between releases. I feel as though maintaining old code--while
in certain cases can be good--leads to code bloat and complicates the
programming exponentially. All changes will be well documented, so
anyone reading the changelog should be able to easily change their code
if they want to use different versions.
Since my last total revision of the Task Tree and the task system, I have been
pretty pleased with the way Dusty Engine's interface works. As I have not come
upon any major problems with the implementation, it will likely remain mostly as it
is for future releases, but always check the changelog and documentation when switching
between versions.
Are You The Only One Working On This?
Technically, yes. With this I would like to have complete control over
development of the official releases. However several suggestions and
bugfixes have been given to me by users of DE, and anyone is welcome to
create new projects with it. Any and all are welcome!
Who Can I Contact About DE?
Send me an email at dustyengine@daveandrews.org.
