A Vm-Based Game Engine

[nexferret]

I've been teaching myself how to program in C now for about three years and whilst I'm not exactly Mr. Torvalds I feel fairly competent, especially working with GL and the like. I've also done quite a bit of work with Unreal Engine 3 and think it'd be an interesting project to make something quite similar; an engine that handles all of the graphics optimization and the handling of media and animation and such and gives developers a platform on which they can control a scene using a simple bytecode VM. A little more abstracted than UE3 and far less overcomplicated but an engine that can be used to write games for the PC, Pandora, or Mac without touching the C source or rebuilding. Rather than compiling code, the IDE would be capable of interacting with the bytecode directly, presenting it to the developer as if it were normal text-based code. But there are some problems.

Firstly, I don't have a Pandora. I don't have £230 right now and won't for some time. This doesn't mean I can't develop much of the systems on my netbook but I won't see it running on the handheld for at least a year. Would I have access to GLSL and the like when developing for the Pandora?

Any thoughts or comments?

 

[greendots]

I wouldn't know about performance issues but if your planning this to be used in commercial works I would be worried. The code could easily be stolen or hacked on for cheats. You would need to write a good code obfuscator for your new language that doesn't reduce performance any further.

 

[nexferret]

I wouldn't know about performance issues but if your planning this to be used in commercial works I would be worried. The code could easily be stolen or hacked on for cheats. You would need to write a good code obfuscator for your new language that doesn't reduce performance any further.

As it'd be in bytecode it'd be pretty well obfusticated as it is and I have an encryption scheme in mind which should be very strong.