Change of project direction

After some careful consideration and weighing up the advantages and disadvantages, I have decided to change the project so it will no longer be a Java applet embedded in a webpage, and will instead be an offline application that can be downloaded and played single player or multiplayer, internet or LAN. The game will now be written in C++ and use OpenGL for the graphics rendering.

The main reason for this change is that I was finding Java to be quite a limitation and although this was pushing me to write well optimised code, I was unhappy with the quality of the graphics. Graphics is certainly the strongest aspect of my programming skills and it would seem a shame to limit myself so much in this area of the game. The game will now feature a fully 3-D environment making use of available graphics hardware. Lighting and effects will be used by writing custom vertex and pixel shaders.

The game will still remain cross platform, and will be released for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I will be using the SDL library to handle input, sound, window management so the porting to other platforms should be fairly trivial.