Quick update:
  • A couple of new Wii and DS devkits have arrived this week, one of the Wii-kits is for me so I will join the party soon, at least part-time.
  • I'm very busy working on Drakensang at the moment, so there won't be a lot of new stuff in the next Nebula3 release from my side, after all I fixed quite a few bugs in the zip-archive code, so that all runtime data is now loaded by default from an export.zip archive (it's also working on the Xbox360, but I will add support for the 360's native compressor at some later time because it's most likely faster then the generic zlib).
  • Johannes Kosanetzky pretty much finished up the Application layer by porting the essential parts of Mangalore over to Nebula3, this will be in the next SDK release even if it's still work in progress. The general plan here is to have a nice little demo application with simple physics, a player-controllable avatar and a chase camera. All with complete integration into our existing level design workflow.
  • Malte has been working on porting the Foundation layer over to the Wii, and is now almost finished with it. The Wii specific code won't be part of the public SDK of course.
  • The Wii-port got a priority boost recently. Because of this we will essentially take a shortcut and add a new "Nebula2 backward compatibility" layer. This layer will contain essential Nebula2 subsystems (for instance animation, audio, characters, etc...) which are just brought over to N3 without alot of refactoring, so that we can get a good base for a real-world project ASAP. The plan is to replace those N2-subsystem step-by-step with properly refactored systems in parallel to actual project development, so that we have enough time for proper refactoring and to implement platform-specific optimizations where applicable.
Slight Wii rant: Aaargh... hardware considerations aside (involving GameCubes, duct tape, etc... which I have no problem with since a scalable engine can take care of that). But I'm really shocked about the development environment and API. I think the last time I worked in a similar environment was when we did Urban Assault in Watcom-C under DOS-Protected-Mode. This was in the mid-90's. Memories of AmigaOS pop up as well (although AmigaOS was in several aspects more advanced, and this was in the mid-80's). I appreciate the simplicity of the hardware and software and all, but... WTF? It's like 20 years of progress in software development simply didn't happen. We're basically expected to built gothic cathedrals with a hand-axe... did I mention already how amazingly f*cking cool the 360's development environment is? Well nevermind...

One more reason to get N3 up and running on the Wii ASAP ;)