Author Archives: Geoff Evans

Helium DevCon Spring 2013

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Its my pleasure to announce Helium DevCon Spring 2013! It will take place May 4th and 5th in downtown Los Angeles. Whitemoon Dreams has graciously offered up some office space for us to work! So far we have 4 attendees signed up (@gorlak, @aclysma, @andybrk, @okready), but if you are going to be in the LA area and want to join us then come visit our Google Group and let us know you want to come!

I am keen to get more blog updates going as there is work happening on Helium (albeit very slowly). I hope to get at least one post per attendee with an update about what got accomplished.

Areas of potential focus:

Asset system improvements (source assets in JSON, disc/network assets in MessagePack)
OpenGL render interface
Coding on our prototype game (a Geometry Wars clone)
Integration of the Editor with the Asset system
Network object sync using C++ Reflection

Project Update

Things have been pretty quiet for a while on this blog. Much of the team has moved onto other jobs (myself included), but there is a handful of people (myself included) that are continuing with Helium.

Progress is being made to integrate Lunar Engine and Helium Tools code. You can hardly find references to Lunar in the code anymore, with all the namespaces and macros being changed over to Helium.
I have reworked pretty much the entire premake scripts. The project has been split into two solutions now: one for tools (the editor), and one for runtime (the game).
I have setup a CI server at home to try and keep our builds working (20+ projects across x86|x64, Debug|Intermediate|Profile|Release, Tools|Runtime). I applied for an open source license for pulse, so I will probably switch over to that. Paul Haile had good things to say about it, and its free for open source projects.
I am still working to get the engine render working in the Editor viewport. That should be coming back online in a matter of weeks, followed by the return of the manipulators and curve objects.
Work has also started on a new componentized game object update system. More information about that will come as implementation starts to produce some results.

Anyway, just because you don’t see this space updated very often doesn’t mean that work isn’t happening. Drop by and check out our latest commits in our GitHub repo.

Welcome!

Helium aims to be an open source game engine toolkit to help provide foundation technology and GUI tools for building game engines (not games per se).

This project was seeded with code from Nocturnal Initiative, an open source project at Insomniac Games. Its continued development is generously funded by Whitemoon Dreams, Inc.