The Future of SoundWell: SoundWell 3(D)

We’re winding down working on SoundWell (which is generation 2) to start working on SoundWell 3… which is 3d! Hence SoundWell 3(D).

There are a few technical reasons for this. It’s becoming increasingly high overhead to work on the current SoundWell because it is written in the D language, a descendant of C, and compiles natively for our targets. We wrote our own engine and all of the annoying niggly bits to manage animations and whatnot, and doing any future work would be a lot of extra overhead, and it’s just not the kind of thing we can spend time on anymore. A couple of weeks ago Cassowary decided to just bite the bullet, rip off the bandaid, and grin and bear proceeding with a rewrite using our preferred current platform Heaps.io. Turns out Heaps is a lot faster in practice than our kind of hand-hewn opengl stuff, and we get 3d, scenegraphs, overlays and animations for free, and other fun things! Plus nice portability. So, good all around, and getting to know our toolchains better for other projects.

Watch this space for exciting developments!

Above: A screenshot showing a torture test of our planet system in SoundWell 3(D) - 1 million planets

Above: Working on the gravitation system, showing a mere 1000 planets, runs at 60FPS tho!