How have you been? I’ve been reeeaally busy playing Portal 2. It’s a great game. You should go buy it. Now.

Though, the singleplayer mode is played through in around 6 hours, so there was also some time left for Dualitor development. While there’s still a lot of stuff in a “Well, it works” state it’s finally possible to play around with content. You can take a look at it by clicking on the left image.

It took me around 3 seconds to import the wallpaper image into the project, another 5 seconds to set up the Texture, 5 more for the Material and not much longer to create a GameObject that displays it. The workflow feels okay so far, but there’s still a lot to improve. That’s why I’m heading towards a first pre-Alpha release with minimal functionality. I’m going to need testers to improve usability as much as possible.

I’m working on some kind of custom PropertyGrid Control right now. You might have spottet it in some of the Screenshots that I’ve previously posted. .Net does have an existing PropertyGrid which is customizable to some degree and I could just have used it – but after doing that in Nullpunkt and not being very happy with the results I’m now trying a different approach.

During my time at Limbic Entertainment I mostly worked on a project that was using the Unity game engine. In my eyes, Unity is a great piece of game authoring software, but nobody’s perfect; there still were some missing or somewhat unpolished features. Take the Prefab system: Its great to have something like this and it works flawlessly in most cases. Want to use a specific enemy type over and over again? Just make it a Prefab and re-using it boils down to a single dragdrop operation. When changing the Prefab later on, all instances are affected properly. But here’s the “not great” part:

If you use .Net Serialization, especially Deserialization, you might want to have an object perform a specific action as soon as it has been deserialized, initialize some cache data, resolve references or something.

When I began to write ZweiDe back in 2007, the target framework was .Net 2.0. The third framework version was already released, but I assumed it would severely impact compatibility to require the newest stuff available. As it took years to bring ZweiDe anywhere near release, it was of course irrelevant. I didn’t care much since I had no practical idea of what I was missing anyway. In Duality, calculating with an estimated development time of forever, I figured out it might be worth a try targeting .Net 4.0 right from start.