Okay, well this is a tricky call to make, since Torque annoyingly no longer provides the whole ‘free if you render a Torque logo in the corner all the time’ licence, so I can’t actually download the source code to see how it looks. However, I have tried out Crystal Space, and while its free, I must say I’ve not been impressed by the layout or demos. In addition, Torque has pedigree so to speak, and while the demos all look and feel to me like Tribes (understandably so), thats not necessarily a bad thing. The netcode design seems pretty sound (and actually not hugely far away from my original model); so it should suffice for a demo, and hopefully be easy to refactor later into the production model.

So, I’m going to fork up the cash and buy and indie licence for Torque for 100 USD and see how that goes. Thank goodness for the crappy US exchange rate just now, eh?

On an unrelated note, I’m tempted to try and find a copy of my original fourth year Uni report, as its got quite a lot of relevant stuff, and maybe host it here for all to read (rather than it just languishing in some room in the J.C.M.B. untouched for the rest of time).

Well, back from an enjoyable (read: liver-bashing) bank holiday weekend to the real work. In one of my trademark sweeping and poorly justified decisions, I’ve decided that the Company will take bank holidays off, and not count them in the regular holidays. Thats something about my old job which I was undecided about the merits of it, but I think its good for morale to get the holidays which everyone else gets – its pretty depressing when you have to go to work, but everyone else is planning for long weekends.

Anyway, found a useful piece on Joel on Software, recommending VMWare. Looks like an invaluable tool for diagnosing installation problems and various other configuration nasties that plague PC games development. “It works on my machine” isn’t really a solution.

On todays agenda: some more financing research, some more writing up of mid-level designs for some of the ideas bandied around in the forums (to try and find any gaping holes), and poking and prodding of game engines to see if they’re suitable for building our demo on. Currently top of the pile are looking like Crystal Space and Torque (a la Tribes) .