For the past year of my life, I have devoted myself full time to making the most realistic space combat simulator the world has ever known. A year ago, this was pushing the boundaries of our engine:
Now, this is:
In the past year ScrumbleShip has gone from a barely functional tech demo to something much more.
We've begun to simulate personal interaction in space with handheld lasers, suits, suit oxygen, suit energy, reaction mass and health.
We've improved the visual look of the game by adding hundreds of blocks, adding animations, creating a lighting system, adding a HUD, and increasing the render distance by a factor of ten. We've added interactive doors, airlocks, switchable lights, clamps, and many other interactive blocks. We've grown a community and set up a website with pre-orders, a forum, a wiki, a dev blog, bleeding edge snapshot access, and a bug tracker.
We've added sounds and music to the game. We've developed working builds for Windows, Linux, and are starting to have the first prototype native Mac builds. We've implemented damage by selectively removing voxels to expose the inner workings of any object that happens to be under fire.
We've added a heat engine, unique among 3d games, that transfers heat and melts surrounding blocks based on real life thermal science. We've worked with other developers to fix graphics card issues and to get a functional voxel editor for our community.
David A Wheeler's "SlocCount" tells me that I've written about 16,000 lines of code in the past year. For an average C program, it estimates that this would take one person 3.7 years to code, and cost a company around $500,000usd to create. So by its measure, I'm 2.7 years ahead of schedule and a half a million under budget!
That's what we did in our first year. I wonder where we'll be next year.
Cheers,
-Dirk
congratulations!
keep on the good work :)
Thank you! Will do!
-Dirk
16.000 lines of code in one year? Hats off to you! That's better than writing a book. Actually it's like writing a 800 pages book (20 lines a page) and I don't think writers write such an amount of pages in a year.
Congratulations!
I... Woah. I actually hadn't thought to put it in book terms.
Checking out the math, your estimate seems REALLY close: If you take my 908332 character total and divide it by the 5.1 character average English word length, you get 178104 words. If you then divide that by 250 words per page in the average novel, you end up at 712 pages.
On the other hand, that's only about 3.5 National Novel Writing Months (50,000 words) stacked on top of each other. Even softening that with an equal number of National Novel Editing Months, I still have about 5 months extra to account for. Clearly I need to do better in the coming year!
Cheers,
-Dirk
I'm pretty sure that National Novel Editing Months are only once a year, so you are actually two and half years ahead of schedule! Go get some rest! :)
A pretty insightful set of data, certainly shows how one person can accomplish the work of ten people :D
Congratulations on all you have accomplished, Dirkson! Take a moment to celebrate if you haven't already! You truly deserve it.
And then get back to work! The next 16,000 LOC aren't going to write themselves! ;D
What if that's his a fore mentioned contingency plan?
If he has a way to do that, I want to know. He could make MILLIONS.