Mt Fuji Engine and Caelestis

Mt Fuji Engine and Caelestis

November 6th, 2006, 22:03 Posted By: wraggster

Turkeyman has posted news of an excellent new graphics engine for the PSP/PS2, heres the long post he made:

Hey people,

I just wanted to expose some stuff I've been working on for a year or 2.

Firstly, I have been working on a well defined cross platform engine for about 2 years which I call 'Mount Fuji'.

Not being happy with any existing freely available options, my goal with it was to create a fully fledged game engine which is properly optimised for each system, which doesn't rely on any typical (and often flakey) cross platform libraries.. So I hit the hardware as directly and optimally as I can on all supported platforms (which will hopefully grow to 'all' platforms)..
The logic here is that its as small and tight as I can make it while still being fully functional, and it provides a consistant interface to all aspects of the game.
Additionally, I provide an art and asset pipeline for getting data from art and asset creation packages into the game.. Since platforms ideally read optimised raw platform specific data at runtime from a platform specific game archive, there are a suite of tools to convert to system specific formats from many common source asset formats.

Its fairly well developed now. For the interested, I have placed the current interface documentation on the net here:
http://www.dotblip.com/fuji/doc/modules.html

Or the main page:
http://fuji.dotblip.com/

Also of moderate interest (and I'm sure many who read this forum have already seen floating around), I've been working on a game based on my engine. You can see it here:
http://caelestis.dotblip.com/screenshots.html

Its a little japanese themed action RPG style hack and slash (or at least it will be soon)..
Its coming along surprisingly well, and I've finally found some excellent art talent and its starting to come to life.
I'll hopefully release a small demo in the next little while.

And now for the crux of my post :P

As you can gather, my engine (and my game also) is a fairly ambitious task. Its moving along surprisingly well but maintaining all those platforms is becoming difficult to do on my own in what little spare time I have these days..

I wanted to find if there was anybody in the PSP and PS2 scene that would be interested in helping me maintain the platform ports. This wouldn't require too much of your time, just build the game from time to time and see if it still works properly on each platform. As I work I tend to introduce bugs that may break compilation or compatibility with one platform or another, and it would be nice to have a couple of people helping me catch these bugs..
Ideally, I'd like to find someone that can see the importance of such an offering in the homebrew scene (allowing people to easilly make commercial grade games as an alternative to simple LUA applications for example) and would help me optimise each platform aswell.
Since I dont have a lot of time anymore, I usually just get something running and move on to the next thing.. I have a list of optimisations a mile long (most of them are simple things too) that I just haven't had time to get in there.

Please dont look at this like a cop out, and looking for someone else to do my dirty work. Trust me, I'd love to do it myself, I just dont have as much time as I'd like anymore, and I'm also dividing it between engine development and my game, and I thought my engine may be of some interest to the community.

The other thing that I'd like to know is if such an offering would be of actual interest to anybody in the homebrew scene, and if they'd be keen to work on their own homebrew based on my tech?
I know a lot of programmers enjoy writing their own engine code, but I know a lot of people also just want to get their game idea up and running as quickly and easilly as possible. And I'd offer my full support here.

This would help me out in a lot of ways. Mainly, having some others working off my technology would help raise issues and problems that I hadn't considered while working on my own game, and also find bugs that slip through the cracks :P

Anyone interested in assisting me with the platform maintainance would have to have good understanding of the systems at the hardware level, however anyone with any reasonable programming experience would be good to have working on their own project, as their success would be a good reflection of the interface design.

Comments and criticism welcome.