ORCS! project Homepage

The ORCS! Website at the moment is empty, carrying just some very basic information about the ORCS! project and a work-in-progress update table, which you can find below in this page. The pages are still left as they were when the project started, several years ago.

Basically ORCS! is a very complex and ambitious software project which should lead to the construction of an engine for a whole new generation of roguelike games.

The engine (which is being made for linux) will provide the ability to build games characterized by numberless, unbelievable features and an unseen, vast extendability and complexity. All this thanks to the use of a highly customized object-oriented framework, particularly crafted for rolegames. The object-oriented framework will implement features which are currently available just on cutting-edge languages in development (dynamic code evolution, dynamic classes, interchangeable code and so).

If you want to know more about it, you can read the following (very old) short pages: What is ORCS!? and Why ORCS!?.

Right now, the project is being constantly worked on, and by early next year the first working ORCS! system and first game should see the light on the net.

If you want to follow the progress of my work, just bookmark this page and reload it once every while.

If you want to get in touch with the maintainer of the project (and currently, the only one working on it), mail a message to Fabio d'Alessi.

If you *seriously* want to contribute to the project get in touch with the above address (currently, I just need someone to work on an OpenGL 3D renderer).

3.Sep.2002	Four years... four years of work, life, everything... for years.... Diablo-II, the new main Angband release, Warcraft III, Roguelike News closed, many new things on the market, on the net... and still ORCS! is light years ahead. Whoever still remembers the ORCS! developer mailing list knows some of the inner features of ORCS! and can see, now, how right we were 5 years ago in defining our idea "revolutionary" - an idea which should have remained unsurpassed for a decade, as it still is. I am approaching it again, one more time... my hands on it... cleaning the dust out of .tar.gz archives lost in far sectors of my hard drives... ORCS! is cold, but it's not dead yet. My hands on it.
09.Sep.1998	Wow. Long time since the last update. This has been a very busy week where I work, as I had to complete the DNA-analyzing program I have been working on in the last months, as well as to put online some extremely important genetic scientific data for our organization, generated by that program. If you want to take a look to the first human DNA transcript map of a tissue (skeletal muscle), take a look here. As you might see, it's quite a lot of work... if only I had the same time to work on ORCS! it would have been ready eons ago ;-) Anyway, now entity handlers are almost complete and work smoothly. I did quite some testing on them with atoms as well as more complex objects. At the same time, I have started the kernel code for the workspaces, which represent the low-level mechanism the kernel will use to communicate between the various message handler microcodes. For those familiar with C programming, workspaces are similar to the argument list (parameters) of a C function call, just way more flexible. More tasty piece of news: now that I seem to have some working pieces in my hands, I have started planning also the first simplest action-reaction environment where to make extensive testing. I am writing a short text about it and will upload it here tomorrow or so, just to keep you hooked up while I code .
28.Aug.1998	Completed a part of the entity handler. Now it handles correctly atoms (integers, strings), objects and methods. Still undone the code dealing with arrays and cameras. Preliminary tests ran flawlessly, but I think the overall handler can be optimized. I will be thinking about this during this weekend. BTW, to perform more accurate and complex tests I need to code a few other parts of the kernel, so I think it's better to start working on the internal framework interface and the object manager before optimizing things. I will be working on these from next monday, and I should have far more things to say in a week or so.
24.Aug.1998	The dynamic code linker is complete. Today I am going to perform some tests on the linker, then I will be moving on to coding the entity handler. The entity handler is another part of the ORCS! kernel which should handle the insertion/removal of entities into objects and classes. In ORCS!, an entity represents an incarnation of almost anything, ranging from objects, classes, single actions to arrays of data, keyed-arrays and more complex data/code sets. The way these entities are arranged should ensure some interesting features such as: fast lookup unlimited object extendability/complexity dynamic runtime code/data evolution runtime editing/browsing/debugging The last feature, more specifically, will allow easiest navigation through an ORCS! running system, as entities ensure a human-friendly form of data and code organization, retaining crucial source symbols and labels and overall code structure. After all, being able to easily analyze and modify an ORCS! system while it's running it's one of the basic goal of my current ORCS! kernel design.
19.Aug.1998	After weeks of planning, testing and preliminary writing of small programs and sets of simplified routines to check the real possibilities of such a complex system, today I started the serious coding of the ORCS! kernel. First step: writing the *dynamic code linker. This could take quite a while, but I expect to have a complete dynamic linker ready within the next week. For those who may be interested in this, the dynamic code linker* is a fundamental section of the ORCS! framework kernel, and will handle the insertion/removal of microcode chunks into a running ORCS! environment (a game). Keep in mind that everything in ORCS!, from objects and classes, to events, actions, reactions and anything else always contain hybrid sets of data and active microcode. Dynamic code linking is done pre-compiling every active code segment into position-indepent microcode sets, and then creating libraries of code sets to be loaded & executed dynamically while the game takes place. Thanks to this feature, it is possible to modify, edit, recompile, extend and refresh single entities without having to recompile an ORCS! game (or even just quit and restart it). It all happens transparently and dynamically. Also, this will allow the construction of gaming environments where not only the data itself grow and evolve dynamically, but (most important) where also the active-code does.
August-July 1998	Previous updates


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