Today marks a milestone in the Astrum Futura project. After almost a month of internal planning, wide ranging discussions and even a public vote for the project name, I have completed the initial organisation of the source code. This involved selection of appropriate libraries, the inevitable trial and error of test code, creation of a complementary Quantum Library, a few forays into the Zend Framework’s components, and some upfront optimisation (nothing premature – simple things like implementing __autoload).

Astrum Futura is slated as an open source PHP game. Specifically a space strategy (no flash, just oodles of text). The open source PHP game genre has something of a stigma attached to it due to previous (even present :-() poor coding practices. Most games wind up under the management of novice programmers or were essentially completed pre-2001 (i.e. the PHP3 era) and are gathering dust along with security exploits. Others I can’t even mention without squirming. But it’s not a lost cause – there are a minority of seriously cool developers on the scene (some even raise heads and release stuff like ADOdb Lite and Template Lite to prove it ;-)). AF, I hope, is one of those elite group of game projects with a serious effort and a heck of a lot of fun squatting behind it.

The source actually does very little (initial commit, just about functional), at present only allowing account signups and logins (so basic you may even cry). Even then it needs some manual setup using an SQL file and a database config file. But it paints a picture of the final setpiece we’ll be working with, and offers something feedback can be provided for. You can checkout/export the current code (revision 23 at time of writing) using your svn client for a looksee from:

https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/astrumfutura

We’ve also setup an svn commit mailing list, astrumfutura-svn@lists.sourceforge.net on Sourceforge. The SF summary page is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/astrumfutura. Additionally, you can see a brief commit summary, and aggregate a commit log RSS feed from http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/astrumfutura. I’ve aggregated the RSS feed on my blog for reference.

The library list being used includes:

ADOdb-Lite 1.30
Swiftmailer 2.1.17
SimpleTest 1.0.1beta
Zend Framework (trunk)
Quantum Library (trunk)

* (trunk) indicates use of current development code

Big thanks go out to my fellow administrator, Lee, and also James for the week-in/week-out drudgery of planning discussions, brainstorming, and TDD coding. Nah, it’s been exciting original stuff ;-). Getting this far would have been that little bit more difficult without the help of Swiftmailer‘s developer, Chris Corbyn, who has setup an svn repository for his totally excellent and mind blowing mail library. Fifteen minutes of looking and I was hooked, man. Another goes out to Mark Dickenson who gave developers and performance nuts the gift of ADOdb Lite, later firing a broadside at Smarty with Template Lite.

Enough typing for now… There’s a game needs developing.

Related posts:

  1. Astrum Futura: An open source space strategy game project
  2. Astrum Futura: A Space Strategy Game for the Web 2.0 Era
  3. Subversion on Sourceforge
  4. ADOdb Lite
  5. Template-Lite…here we go again…