A new focus for Essence

It has been quite a while since my last post. We have been busy working on the world editor tool. This week, I would like to announce a new focus for our project.

As you may already know, Project Essence is a two part project including the development of a Java based 3D graphics engine and an action oriented MMOG. However, so far our focus has always been the actual game development. The engine and tool chain development have always been driven by art team requirements. During the several meetings we had last week, our team has reached a conclusion that it would be a better approach for us to focus on the actual engine development instead of the game development, both in terms of our project and our personal career development. Therefore, starting from this week, we will heavily focus on developing our engine.

So now, let me say a few things about the engine itself. We are trying to develop a true AAA quality 3D graphics engine with all the state of the art features and capabilities. The engine itself is implemented completely on the Java platform with native graphics access provided by LWJGL on top of OpenGL. The engine features a shader oriented, message passing architecture to fully support GLSL shaders and multithreaded processing. Since the engine is still under development, I don't want to go into too much details on the specific features. But we are doing our best to make it support all the possible cutting edge features you can imagine with the highest possible performance.

Hopefully we can soon show off some of the features we've implemented. But now, I should get back to code. Have a nice day.

P.S. We are hoping that one day our engine can make its way onto the consoles along with our MMOG. In fact we specifically designed the game to suit the console environment. So if you have the connections and resources to port Java onto the consoles, please, please please do so! A million thanks!