Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Introducing RDX

Has it really been a year since the last update?

Well, things have been chugging along with less discovery and more actual work. However, development on TDP is largely on hold due to the likely impending release of the Doom 3 source code, which has numerous architectural improvements like rigid-body physics and much better customization of entity networking.


In the meantime, however, a component of TDP has been spun off into its own project: The RDX extension language. Initially planned as a resource manager, it has evolved into a full-fledged programmability API. The main goal was to have a runtime with very straightforward integration, to the point that you can easily use it for managing your C++ resources, but also to be much higher performance than dynamically-typed interpreted languages, especially when dealing with complex data types such as float vectors.

Features are still being implemented, but the compiler seems to be stable and load-time conversion to native x86 code is functional. Expect a real release in a month or two.

The project now has a home on Google Code.