| In the summer of 2004, I started working on a project which I creatively named "Untitled RPG." I was writing the program in C++ and using GLUT/OpenGL for the graphics. A fair amount of progress was made, but I believe I spent too much time focusing on the game engine instead of other aspects. I had thrown together a crude, and largely not user-friendly, map editor to go along with it. Eventually, I abandoned the project as I became busy with other things. Some time passed, and at one point I threw together another map editor using Java/JOGL and a Swing GUI by basically copying and pasting everything I had written in C++, with minor changes here and there to deal with language differences. Again, I abandoned the project for a while. Around the spring of 2006, however, my interest in the idea was renewed after watching my girlfriend (now wife) play Dragon Quest VIII and then beginning to play the game some myself. Since I wasn't overly thrilled with what I had done so far with the project, and after doing some research, I decided to pretty much start from scratch and call it the RPG Toolset. The discovery of Xith3D and learning more about scenegraphs led to this, in addition to the fact that I wanted to create a custom look and feel and a more flexible GUI. Eventually I stumbled upon jMonkey Engine and switched things over to it after deciding it was better suited for what I wanted to accomplish. Below is a mostly encompassing list of technologies I am using or plan to use while developing the RPG Toolset. |
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 | | Java is an object-oriented programming language that I am using to develop the RPG Toolset. The language itself is platform independent, therefore applications written in Java will run on most operating systems. |
|  | | jMonkey Engine is a high performance scenegraph based graphics API for developing OpenGL applications. The engine currently runs on top of LWJGL, the Lightweight Java Game Library. The scenegraph makes building a scene much simpler by representing the scene as a node-based data structure. |
|  | | FengGUI is an OpenGL-based API that is being used to create the in-game user interface. |
|  | | Eclipse is an integrated development environment for editing, debugging, and compiling Java source code. Eclipse is my IDE of choice for developing Java applications. The toolset itself is based on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) and uses SWT for the user interface. |
| | | JavaCC (Java Compiler Compiler) is a parser generator for use with Java applications. This is being used to create the parser that parses the game scripts. |
|  | | Blender is an open source application for 3D modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. I will be using Blender for the creation of 3D game content, including things such as map tiles, static objects, and animated models for characters & monsters. |
|  | | OGRE is an open source 3D engine. The OGRE mesh/skeleton file format will be used for 3D models and animations. |
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