Iamsure has returned to the blogosphere over on http://kabal-invasion.blogspot.com.

For those not familiar with his open source developments, he’s a developer on the PHP Blacknova Traders game project, and is currently planning a PHP library focused to an extent on games, called JOMPT. To add to infamy, Iamsure suggested a name for my current game project which eventually won the tie-breaker after a public vote – hence we have "Astrum Futura" :-).

In the opening post of his new blog, he makes some general observations. He mentions Astrum Futura, and gives a quick opinion on the opening shot in this project. One note is that he’d like to see the "ability to drop-in/override certain backends with alternatives". Presumably this is directed towards the interface between the current Controllers and the ZF which is pretty tight at the moment. As an observation, I’ll quickly note the ZF defines a series of Interfaces which make adding alternative backend libraries relatively simple (just need a specific Facade/Adapter for each alternative library). Largely explains why I’m using Zend_View for now instead of Template Lite which I would prefer, among other things.

A second observation is made that a few of the open source PHP games he follows (as do I) have slowed down. I suppose that’s an inevitable facet of open source development in general – only the larger popular projects manage to maintain momentum in the absence of the main developers driving progress with their big picture objective setting and the help of cat-o’-nine tails… Legend of the Green Dragon lost a few of its primary developers some time ago, so until the takeover developers pick up momentum and/or get a grip on where the game is going and get an action plan together we’ll likely see the current progress inch along.

Final mention goes to JOMPT, the proposed PHP library Iamsure has had on the back burner for a while now (I remember it being mentioned way back when). As noted Astrum Futura does sort of hit similar objectives, though our reliance on the Zend Framework has restricted out own goals to a more specific set of functionality – primarily reuseable classes that are independent, unit tested, and target specific game elements like Mapping and AI (plus more as the AF project moves along).

Related posts:

  1. Astrum Futura: A Space Strategy Game for the Web 2.0 Era
  2. Astrum Futura: An open source space strategy game project
  3. phpGameDev (a resource for PHP game development)
  4. PFP II: Return of Patterns For PHP
  5. Astrum Futura to Subversion