One of the things every open source project strives for is meeting the expectations of a group of people with similar needs, requirements and goals. When successful, a project can gain a lot of benefits from more hands committing code to the repository to the influx of new ideas and perspectives.

As announced on his blog, Jacob Santos, who leads a group of PHP game developers under the Absidon flag, has decided to add additional support to the Astrum Futura effort. He touches on a few of the core reasons for doing so.

The goal of Astrum Futura is grand, but will have a lot more developers in which to achieve that goal. Astrum Futura as a game won’t exactly be what I want in a few of my other games, but the backend and some elements of the front end will used in each of the projects. It doesn’t make sense to continuously create the same thing over and over again.

The goal of Astrum Futura as stated is to create a professional level PHP application. That it’s a game shouldn’t lose it any brownie points on that front ;-). Behind the AF front lies the areas Jacob mentions above.

AF makes use of the newly formed Quantum Game Library (QGL) project, an independent collection of classes focused on solving common gameplay problems in PHP. Santos has already undertaken to work towards a contribution to the library focusing on AI tasks such as Pathfinding, Fuzzy Logic and Neural Networks. He also has a future proposal to submit for a common Mod/Plugin component. The benefits of this library is its potential for reuse in future games, whether they be developed by the current AF team or the Absidon team. AF is also built on the Zend Framework, which offers a structural standard to code to (and another common point between game applications).

It doesn’t necessarily stop there though. AF is working on a few levels; implementing an AJAX interface, focusing on Javascript development, using a non-compiling system for translations, creating a kitted out build process using Phing, and a few others. It’s a highly structured environment to develop in and the response over the last month by the developers (including of course Santos) has been a few cuts above my usual experiences.

Jacob, continues his blog post with a quick summary of the Absidon projects. There’s quite a collection of game projects from the Absidon stable: Mecha Asylum, Battle Machines, Heat of the Race and Earth 3045. On a personal level I like Earth 3045, which is a planet based strategy and management style game. It’s geared towards an AJAX interface and will implement AI features. He also outlines the future AI and Mod proposals for the QGL (Quantum Game Library) AF utilises.

I’d like to thank Jacob for his contributions to the AF forum and the QGL source over the past few weeks. He’s taken the lead in a few areas and helped ramp up the project’s internal activity. That AF is a project whose design and focus on good practice is enabling other projects share in the open source benefits is rewarding for the whole development team.

You can catch Santos’ regular blog posts over on his personal blog – http://www.santosj.name