Waste's Edge

In its early days, with just a minimal version to show, Adonthell attracted the interest of a large number of open source enthusiasts. We easily had a team of 10 programmers, artists, musicians and writers (with some fluctuation) and development was pretty fast and continuous. But did we have the ability to actually create something that would resemble a playable game? We'd better find out!

So Waste's Edge was born, somewhat inspired by the Trinsic murder-mystery but set in the world that had been devised for Adonthell. It was released for GNU/Linux on January 28, 2002. Ports to BeOS, BSD, MacOS X, Solaris and Windows followed eventually. It also slowly found its way into various Linux distributions and sparked another year of fast-paced development.

But it also turned out to be a dead-end, technology wise. Its 320x240 resolution made it the perfect toy for devices like the Sharp Zaurus, but it was limiting our artists and starting to look dated.

The game engine was not very modular either, and the code had become convoluted and cruft had accumulated over time.

In brief, it wasn't the foundation we wanted to build upon any future releases.

And then, somewhere during that phase of redesign, the team ran out of power. Some key developers got busy in real life, others perhaps frustrated by the slowing progress and the rest might have thought the success of Waste's Edge meant "mission accomplished". Whatever the reason, there Adonthell was, with a shiny new architecture, tons of new features that weren't properly integrated yet and, maybe the worst of all, a half-finished map engine. For the first time, there was nothing graphical to show, so sparking new interest in the OSS developer community became very hard.

Should that be the end? Waste's Edge had turned out fairly nice, but it was nowhere near our original goal yet. So the answer was found quickly and it was "no". But how to breath live back into a struggling project? Stay tuned and you'll find out soon ...

Intro

As the title says. this will mostly be used as a developers diary, documenting my work on Adonthell. But before diving into recent events -- to build up the suspense -- allow me to digress a little bit.

Enter 1997. We had seen The Black Gate in 1992, Serpent Isle and Ambermoon in 1993. Baldurs Gate wasn't due until 1998, Planescape Torment not before 1999. Already a few years without any remarkable CRPG had passed. So what's a CS student who just went through a crash course in C++ at that time to do? Roll his own, of course!

While 1997 wasn't the year of Linux on the Desktop, you'd find people to borrow the latest SuSE from (release September 1996 in my case) and the idea of OSS was generally catching on. Since a CRPG rivaling any of the above isn't written in a day or two (and not in 10 years either) by a single person, the prospect of working with like-minded people across the globe seemed appealing at that time. But before this could happen, there needed to be a plan and some code to show, perhaps. In brief, there was work to do.

Fast forward to 1999. There was a spec, a dialogue system with graphical editor, a web site and a bit of luck running into like minded people that had code and artwork complementing my own. Adonthell was born. In the same year, Sourceforge.net opened its doors, offering exactly the tools that made collaboration on OSS projects simple and efficient. Adonthell joined January 2nd, 2000 and became project no. 1051 on the then young (and friendly) platform.

Since then I've spent a good deal of my spare time (sometimes more, sometimes less) on Adonthell and I still happen to do that on a fairly regular basis. From now on, I'd like to take some of that time to write about stuff I'm up to, interesting bits of code and a few other things that might fit the general theme, in the hope that fellow developers, fans waiting for the upcoming v0.4 release and even the occasional newcomer will find interesting and entertaining tidbits on these pages.