A Look Back: Gothic 1

In just two days, “Risen” will be on the store shelves. Risen is the inofficial child to the excellent Gothic series, a trilogy of role-playing games produced by german developer Piranha Bytes.

Because of this special opportunity, allow me to revel in ancient times and take a look back at the series’ previous games. I have played all parts so far, including all add-ons, with the exception of the publisher’s cannibalization attempt that is “Forsaken Gods” (which means I played exactly one Add-On, “Night of the Raven” :P).

In my opinion, no other game can compare to this series, no Elder Scrolls, no Baldur’s Gate and no Fallout. Read on to find out why I’m so addicted to the Gothic series :)

Scan of the Gothic 1 package cover

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Logo of the Nuclex Framework, the text "Nuclex" with three green dots on a blue ring

Nuclex Framework on CodePlex

The Nuclex Framework has been released to CodePlex today!

The word 'Nuclex' with a stylish font framed by an elliptical ring with three dots

Instead of only writing about all the cool stuff and then pointing people at my Subversion repository whenever someone asks for the source code, I finally sat down and published the entire Nuclex Framework on CodePlex, together with lots of examples, documentation and screen shots.

The Nuclex Framework consists of small isolated building blocks that you can pick from, so you can easily use just the things you require and ignore the rest (or even create your own trimmed-down edition of the framework if you’re not worried about doing it all again when a new version is out).

All the highlights I wrote about in this blog (and quite a lot that I didn’t write about) are neatly organized in there. And the code’s quality should hopefully speak for itself :)

Just to list some of the more interesting things, there’s a Deque collection (faster than List<> and LinkedList<> and much less garbage), 3D vector font rendering code, 7-Zip content compression, a 3D SpriteBatch equivalent, rectangle packing algorithms for texture atlas creation, a flexible multi-threaded particle system, a work-in-progress GUI library with skin support, a cleaner game state management system, a debug overlay renderer and some helpers that allow you to automatically create VertexDeclarations from a structure without listing the VertexElements by hand.

So what are you waiting for, check it out! :D