February 2026

Exams are over, second semester is starting, but I've started work on migrating the game engine to SDL. Wasn't that hard, things are going really smoothly and I've finally implemented multithreading in the engine. Given my education as Computer Science Engineer this wasn't that hard, but I'm surprised I got it to work without bugs right from my first try. I'll be making a free cross-platform music player using SDL and parts of the engine to get a better feel for the library before I jump right into fully renovating the engine. SDL's base CPU rendering is also kind of ass, since it's a fallback option rather than a full implementation. I understand that, since after all it's pretty difficult to get right. However, I'm going to try to convince some of my professor's that making a software rendering library for SDL using multithreading and BLAS (and AVX/AVX512 for the processors which support it) is a proper Master Thesis subject, which would allow me to work more on the game's engine throughout the entire year. That would be really cool.

January 2026

Learned about SDL some time ago, I think I'm going to settle on that one for the CPU Rendering (the 3Dzavr engine used SDL for CPU rendering, but I don't like how it's implemented and I think I can make it better). It has a lot of default functionality not included in Raylib, as well as a fair bit of multithreading options since whileSDL can be used as an API for OpenGL, it is not limited to just OpenGL and therefore differs greatly from Raylib. It's especially useful if you're not planning on using OpenGL to begin with.

Also I have exams this month so expect more silence than usual.

November 2025

Alright, recently learned that Raylib is not thread-safe (fancy computer term) so that sucks for optimization, and let optimization be one of the things I really care about. Since Raylib also requires OpenGL which requires a GPU, I've decided to stray away from using not just Raylib, but GPU rendering as a whole. I'm going to be looking for CPU rendering libraries so that anyone can play Six Stars, no matter whether they have the money for a gpu or not. This is going to be a challenge since I still want the game to be 2.5D and have perspective. I've found some libraries that might fit my needs, but I still have to test out each one to see if they have the few things I need. For non-rendering stuff I might still use bits and pieces of Raylib's code and see if I can make them properly multithreaded.

And yeah, this is a lot of extra work, but it's not as much as you might think. The bulk of the engine so far is just my own code in C++ and using Raylib's rendering and loading functions, so it basically acts as an API in that regard. And the neat thing about that is that if you want to switch between two API's with the same functionality, all you need to do is change the functions you use. If university doesn't fuck up my summer schedule, I reckon this will only delay the progress for 2-4 weeks.

October 2025

I picked a bad time to start this website. Last month, university started again for me, and I'm drowning in projects and assignments, so I doubt I'll be able to work on the engine a lot for the forseeable future. Still, I wanted to put something here so it wouldn't be an empty page.

This is the most recent screenshot. Right now, there's not much to look at other than a mismatched dialogue box, but before this I had to write a lot of code! Rendering the spritesheet, the game object management systems, basic npc animations, special tileset rendering, a tile-based collision system, basic from-file level loading, STAIRS, adjustable camera settings, a simple gui system (hence the 2D textbox being rendered over the 3D world), day/night hue shift and most importantly, STAIRS AGAIN THOSE THINGS TOOK SO MUCH TIME AND EFFORT :(

The dialogue box is also part of a larger piece of the codebase that I don't have any way of showing yet; the event system. Again, I'm not using an engine, I'm making the engine, so things like these take time, especially since I'm making it heavily moddable. Thank you for your patience. In the meantine, please check out the pokédex page, as that one will receive regular biweekly updates.