Posted: 2005-04-13

Engine/Zero (Original)

There are probably much better screenshots, or I could try to get a build working. That can be a later thing.

(The "slacker" reference was a meme by Ian McConville of Marathon RED fame)

Across 2004-2006 I had a series of uncontrolled manic episodes. In this time I wrote a first person shooter engine in C using OpenGL.

The resources I had access to were:

• The first 15 NeHe tutorials
• SAMS Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours textbook
• Prior knowledge of the Marathon engine from map-making (itself self taught)
• Prior knowledge of basic 2D graphics from Lysithea (itself self taught)

My understanding of these topics was poor.

Everything else I figured out with sheer unrelenting persistence.

I mostly stopped eating and became quite underweight. My sleep cycle was freewheeling and had nothing at all to do with night and day.

The codebase lived in a single file (the date provided is for this version). This was partly because I did not know anything about software engineering, but mostly because I did not see the need for it. I was holding the entire thing in my head all at once the whole time, and if you'd tried to teach me about OOP I'd have said that these concepts just get in the way. Mr Wright was the name of my German teacher.

It had multiple weapon and enemy types (no AI) with particle physics and a very basic map renderer with simple Newton integration physics and SDL sound playback.

Maarten Tromp (Jemmets) kindly provided 3D models of the Marathon enemies, and was very helpful until I became too unwell to engage with.

At some point in late 2005 to early 2006 my mental health deteriorated to the point where I was no longer able to continue doing this.