Sqeaky awoke Monday to an email from Dave, the organizer of the Omaha Game Developers Association. He asked us to present what we had… which was a robot falling onto another robot… Not acceptable. Despite this we knew we had an engine with lots of great features and nothing visually to show for it. All we needed to do was to turn our falling robots into something impressive.

A picture of Mars, not our enormous sphere for smashing tiny robots.

We took some of the models Tom has been making for us and we set up a little environment. Using this we rolled virtual planetoids onto several hapless robots arranged like bowling pins. The arrow keys and the mouse can be used to move the camera, and the space bar resets the camera. The windows version of our PhysGame Demo is freely available for download ( Under the GNU GPL3 ). For the Linux version please see our Linux Dev Tools wiki page for further guidance on downloading the source and compiling it.

We made an Overview of the Physgame Engine about how the parts fit together. These are available on the Physgame Engine wiki page or for download right here: System Overview as PDF – System Overview as Open Office Drawing.

To go with all the technical stuff about we wanted to say about the engine, we figured it would be a good idea to describe something about the planned game. So we made some mock up Level Ideas and printed them off. They are all on the Level Ideas wiki page.

We got this stuff together, and prepared a list of talking point we wanted to go over. Then we worked on ironing out our bugs. At first we had so many bugs, textures were loading funny, the WorldQueryTool was misinterpreting user input, resetting the zoom was failing (actually John made the whole Camera Manager this week). Fixing some of these bugs made the engine more solid, while fixing others gave us a better insight into how our own code worked.

Finally, we presented at the OGDA meeting. We ran our Physgame engine demo, on both a Ubuntu Linux netbook, and a machine with fairly high end hardware that happened to have Windows 7. It behaved exactly as we expected, and we talked for about 45 minutes about the game and engine design. We only faltered in one place, marketing. We have no quick easy way to describe the game. I guess we will find some marketing students and see what we can make happen.

This week we made a lot of progress. We got some art imported. We added sophisticated camera management. We fixed a bunch of bugs. However, we would have liked more progress on the Physgame Engine, but when don’t we.