The beginning of Essence

It is exciting that I have finally created the first public portal to Project Essence, a commercial project that I have been working on for the past two years. This blog will be maintained by me and Tim, our talented lead software engineer and gameplay designer. As of me, I am the creative director and lead architect of Project Essence.

Project Essence is a two part commercial project initiated in the fall of 2006. The first part of Project Essence is to develop a next generation commercial quality graphics engine using Java and OpenGL technologies. And the second part of Essence is a revolutionary cross-platform, highly action oriented massive multi-player online game. The project is scheduled to reach its alpha stage in fall 2009, which is about half a year from now. Currently the graphics engine architecture has been implemented. Some essential modules have also been implemented and tested. The team is busy working on the first release of our character editor.

Due to time constraints, Essence is currently utilizing some parts of JavaMonkeyEngine at the lower system level. I would really like to thank the brilliant developers of jME. Without their excellent work, Essence would not be able to reach its current stage. And the team of Essence would also like to contribute back to the jME community. Therefore, we will be releasing our character/world editor to the general public under open source license very soon.

That's it for the first post. Stay tuned for more information on our graphics engine and the current progress of the soon to be released character editor next time.

Thanks

Yi