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Nocturnal Initiative™
News
To check out the latest news regarding Nocturnal Initiative™, go to the News page
Check out the News page for information on our GDC 09 releases!
Mission
Our goal is to facilitate and participate in the development of an open collection of libraries and utilities for addressing common challenges in game development.
Nocturnal Initiative™ is not a game engine. The libraries provided here are potentially very useful for developing a game engine, but we want to avoid the 'all things to all people' that so often results in overly complex and/or under-performing monolithic engines. Instead, we want to provide a useful toolbox for the professional game developer.
There are a lot of common problems that are presented during game development. These problems are often solved separately at game studios across the industry. Sometimes the same people end up writing the same solution at several companies throughout their career. This is a waste of resources that can be avoided by openly sharing useful foundation code and techniques across company boundaries. We feel that this kind of sharing will allow studios to focus more on what sets their games apart and less on the basic building blocks necessary to create a modern game. It is our hope that this will result in studios making better games in less time, and hence benefit the industry as a whole.
Licensing
Insomniac Open License (IOL)
- Full source available
- BSD-style, use the code for whatever you want, no strings attached
Projects
These are the currently available Nocturnal Initiative™ projects. Be sure to check the Road Map for a preview of upcoming additions.
Helium - Game engine toolkit
- Revision control (Perforce)
- Generating crash reports
- Program output and logging
- Program startup and shutdown
- Event-based application development
- C++ reflection for serialization and introspection
EShell - The 'Environment Shell' makes working with different environment configurations easier. It uses an XML file to setup environment variables and run a shell of your choice. Its implemented in Perl (developed under 5.8.8).
FragmentShader - A GUI tool for visually graphing and generating computer code. The programming languages it supports are implemented as Lua scripts, so adding new languages can be done without recompiling the tool itself.
Downloads
Code for all of our projects are currently hosted at [our organization page at github]
Community
IRC: irc.freenode.net #nocturnal
Please join one of our mailing lists for updates:
Nocturnal Announcements - For people interested in receiving Nocturnal Initiative™ announcements.
Nocturnal User Discussion - For people who are using Nocturnal Initiative™.
Nocturnal Developer Discussion - For people interested in contributing to Nocturnal Initiative™.
For people interested in joining the Insomniac community for updates on our games, check out Insomniac Community.
Links
Places:
- Submitting Changes for information about how to submit changes for the Nocturnal Initiative™.
- Road Map for information about future releases
- Contact Questions? Comments? Bugs?
People:
