First of all, the Captain of Code, q66 is inches from fully implementing Lua. His next targets for engine development are particles and the UI. In web development news, CubeCreate benefactor BiosElement reports substantial progress on basic user registration and asset management. Congrats to both — CC is becoming more real each day thanks to them.

On the community side of things, I’ve noticed the IRC channel has been pretty lively this past week — that’s great. Regarding more industrious activity, The Glorious Goat and I have a few things for you guys. We’ve put together a new page on the wiki just for art creation, using some links provided by Spiney and our general knowledge of the interwebs. If you have anything to add, feel free. We’ve also compiled a skills list, which you can read more about in this thread here. And I’m pleased to announce our very first mapping contest. I know many of you are itching for something to do and here it is. Prizes await, so check it out.

In addition to helping me out with my endeavors, Goat has been tasked with a few other assignments: a mock-up for the asset website (with some help from the illustrious Spiney), creating a 300 word marketing blurb, and creating a list of engine features like you would see at DevMaster.net. He’s also been busy with a brainstorm regarding Haven which Bios has recently committed.

Regarding the release game, we have one in mind — a cyber-themed FPS Tower Defense — currently being formed in the forums. Chip in with some ideas.

That’s all I have right now, Cubenauts. Be sure to check back soon for another post tying together all the exciting developments happening in the CubeCreate community.

Cyan, out.

Anyhow, to set off with the task:

• The CubeCreate Team:  in a spurt of managerial goodness, the Cubecreate community decided that it might be a good idea to appoint official team positions. It still needs work and there are a lot of vacant positions (which we would like to see filled) so view Here and ask yourself if you’re a hard enough dude to do web development
• Lua switch: Lead dev Quaker has started on switching the scripting language from JavaScript to Lua. Cited reasons include speed, ease of implementation, more commonly used in game environments, smaller dependency size and “Is anyone going to stop me?.” Jokes aside, it has tickled the interest of of Lua game engine LÖVE developer bartbes, who has all kinds of interesting synergies floating around so stay tuned on that front…
• Also, the progress of the aforementioned switch is going quite well, as prophesied by the “simple integration” advantage; Quaker has reported that the scripting engine is working and a good chunk of the engine API is callable from lua already, along with signals that allow for client/server communication. The JavaScript game libraries still need to be ported though, so there’s quite a bit of work that lay ahead yet
• Plans for Propagation: Cyan started a thread regarding increasing the publicity of CubeCreate (such as a moddb page, etc.), in order to generate a bit of interest. Discussion ensued, and we settled on the conclusion that we shouldn’t start with our barrage until we have a:
• Release Game: This is a subject of slightly more intense debate, we are at the moment swinging between doing a Post-Apocalyptic Zombie co-op shooter with fiddlies and doing an Abstract Cyber-Tronlike Virus shooter with fiddlies. The zombie team argue that it is more approachable and more likely to encourage developers to extend it, while the cyber team argue that a zombie shooter will take longer to develop due to a larger amount of assets that need to be created. Verdict is still out on what should be done, but we’ll keep you posted on the developments in that regard.

And that’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for developments from Quaker, artworks from Spiney, stratagem from Cyan and ramblings from Goat

I just wanted to make you know there is now official Mac support in CubeCreate. For build details, see http://docs.cubecreate.org, there are no binaries built atm.

CubeCreate was tested on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, built using both Xcode project generated by CMake and standard Makefiles. For both ways, there are compile docs.

If you’re running Mac OS X and you can build binaries and possibly installers for releases (Installer build guides will be added soon), you’re welcome

For questions about builds or possibly creating official binaries/installers, feel free to ask on our forums or IRC channel (#cubecreate on irc.freenode.net)

quaker66 (lead dev)

• Javascript as sandbox, untrusted code
• Python as non-sandbox, trusted code
• Cubescript for everything in data/

We’re currently preparing things for first pre-alpha release/snapshot/call-it-however-you-want, and one of things to do before doing so is to minimize number of languages.

We decided to get rid of Cubescript and replace it with Javascript, which is already used. We’ll keep var system from cubescript (heavily rewritten, with no use of globals) in, but all API will be exported to JS and used from there. Internal var system is required, that’s why we’re keeping it.

As part of Cubescript removal, it was needed to replace config writer. We finally decided to use JSON to do this, and that’s already done, thanks to great JSON library from http://mjpa.co.uk/blog/view/A-simple-C-JSON-library/. Its author permitted us to use the library under MIT license and we modified it for our needs (those changes will maybe go upstream tho)

Internal variables are already accessible using JS API and some configs in data/ are replaced with JS files.

Currently, fully JS console is being worked on, because that’s part we can’t go further without; after that, all Cubescript command exports will be moved into JS, Cubescript will be stripped down so just var system will remain, and all remaining cubescript files will get replaced. Then, we’re basically done with this and we’ll be closer to release again.

Suggestions and possibly patches are welcome, so is testing, so get the git and try it out!

And feel free to join our forums (http://forum.cubecreate.org)  and IRC channel (#cubecreate on freenode) of course We’re a young project and community supporting us is required.

I’ll keep you further informed about development and other news on this blog, along with BiosElement, who’s doing all the web stuff including this blog and providing hosting space (thx a lot).

quaker66 (lead dev)