Four Island

You may have heard of FourPuzzle. Sounds familiar, right? If it doesn't.... then you may have a point because I can't seem to find the post on Four Island about it. Anyway, FourPuzzle is my grand project. I know I already had a grand project that majorly failed, but I'm sure about this one. FourPuzzle is (going to be) a C++ library that allows you to easily make an RPG game.

"Right," you may ask, "but what does that have to do with the title of the post?" I'm getting to that. See, I started implementing FourPuzzle around November of last year. In Java. Yes, it was originally a Java library. When I had implemented about half of the specification, I came to an important realization. Java is slow. Mmmmhm. It's awesome library and cross-platformness came with a price. A price that didn't work out so well in a game.

So, I stopped development on FourPuzzle in March and sort of forgot about it. Then, when it became time for me to start working on my yearly RPG, I remembered FourPuzzle and though "Hey, it would be great to make this year's RPG in my own engine." So I started trying to implement FourPuzzle in various languages to see how it would work. C++ lasted about 5 seconds before I realized how complicated that would be. C#/Mono lasted a bit longer, but it simply wasn't cross-platform enough for me. Then, I discovered Qt.

Qt. Is. Awesome. It's a C++ library that I like to explain as "Java for C++, without the Java." It's cross-platform. It has a huge amount of classes and functions that I can use (some of which have names very similar to their Java counterparts. I mean, really, FontMetrics and QFontMetrics? :) ) It has a resource compiler. It has a UI designer. It has everything. I am in love. :)

I had previously disliked Qt for the sole reason that KDE was written with it. For those of you who don't know, I use GNOME. GNOME PWNZ. :) But Qt is not responsible for how it is used. Qt is awesome. And it will be used to implement not only the FourPuzzle library, but also an editor program that will allow non-techie people create a FourPuzzle game without having to touch a single line of C++. Stay tuned for details :D