Nexuiz is an open-source, multiplayer FPS game, I’ve worked on and off for the last few years. To be more exact I’ve joined the team called “Alientrap” sometime in September, 2003 and I’m still working on the project now and then.
It was my first bigger project where I was part of a team of dedicated game developers and I’ve certainly learnt a lot from working with them on it.
The game uses as majorly changed Quake1 engine called Darkplaces, written by our lead coder and master of wisdom, Forest ‘LordHavoc’ Hale.
My assignments were supposed to be about everything, but time has showed them to be the engine’s base systems, the virtual machine(VM) and the menu code. I’ve also worked on and debugged the compiler that we used for generating the bytecode the VM interprets, FTEQCC.
This said, let me list the exact things I did (minor stuff excluded):
- Rewriting of the HUD (fall 2003)
- Refactoring of the Virtual Machine (fall 2003)
- Engineering of a menu system using the adapted Virtual Machine specifically for Nexuiz from scratch and designing the engine binding for it on my own. The menu code has undergone various iterations and thus I’ve been working on it a few periods of time: winter 2003/spring 2004, summer 2004, fall/winter 2004/spring 2005, fall 2005.. to be continued)
- Implementation of a SDL base ‘driver’ for the engine (spring 2004)
- Porting of the server-side VM into the refactored VM (spring 2005). We basically had two different VMs inside the engine which could pretty much run the same bytecode but were bound differently to the engine systems. I finished the refactoring job finally and merged the two.
- Rewriting of the server browser and adding support for filtering, etc. (spring 2005)
If someone wants a more detailed explanation of my work on it, I can only suggest reading the stories and tales about it.