For anyone interested in the upcoming release of Redwood Digital Environment System (Redwood DES) for Mac OS X, I’m a little conflicted about what direction to take with it. As many of you know, I’ve been working on Redwood for quite some time, since late 2001, and still work on it regularly, though not always as a primary occupation. During the past several months, however, I’ve spent more time on my current side-project, a 3D game (based on the original 2D Flash game of same name), than on Redwood DES. So I’m going to spend some time over the next couple of weeks to see what kinds of features that are relevant to Redwood. After that, I’ll take a close look at what Redwood users want, and then make a decision as to where to go with it, whether to put it in maintenance mode, or to retire it entirely. So what are my options here? I could: a) Continue supporting Redwood for its current price ($99), while it continues to become more and more obsolete and unsupported; b) Increase the price of Redwood, for the few users who still buy it; or c) Simply make it free for everyone. It could even be several months before I even take any of these options, as I have a little bit of other work to take care of first. And if I don’t end up making a decision, Redwood would eventually be put in maintenance mode anyway, because even if I decided to keep updating it, as many of its many bugs would be fixed, the last Redwood release would never be more than about six months behind. But, of course, if I decide to go with c), you wouldn’t have much of a chance to grab it, because I’d be distributing it illegally. So I’d like to ask you what you think. Do you use Redwood? How often? And would you consider paying even $99 for it, if I made it free? Or would you have more trust in me and my development skills if I retired it instead? Here’s a short description of Redwood, from the Redwood site. “It all started with a simple desire. The goal: to render any view in real-time, which was made possible by using high quality, multi-layered graphics and physically based lighting models. The problem: with those models, to render all but a few special effects requires too much processing power. So they were removed and the game was born.” Sounds interesting. But that was almost five years ago, and we’ve seen all kinds of major advances in graphics technology since then. I’ve also seen a lot of software that uses those advances. Is Redwood really the one program that could be useful for this? Or should it just get shelved and forgotten about? I have the feeling that, in this day and age, Redwood is not worth spending $99 on. If that’s so, then I need to start looking at some different things I can do with the time that I’m not spending on Redwood. So which do you think I should do, and why? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. For those of you who have no idea what Redwood is, it’s a software system for writing real-time 3D games on Mac OS X. It’s been around since about 2001, and I’ve worked on it almost since day one. At the time, however, I did most of my development work on Windows, so that was the primary target platform for Redwood at first, because it’s very Windows-centric, and I still need to use Windows at work, where I write a lot of games. And that’s still why most of my development time is spent on Windows, instead of Mac OS X. So it’s been many years since I’ve done any real work on Redwood itself, and I’m now in the process of rewriting it completely in C++ for Mac OS X and using the latest version of Allegro 5 as the game engine, instead of GDI. And I’m hoping to make it run better and better over time, while also moving to a Linux port. My friend Brian’s daughter, who goes by the name “Princess Sparkles” on DeviantArt, asked me to do her a quick digital painting for her, and this is what I came up with. She’s a big Pokémon fan, and as you can see, this painting is of one of the Pokémon named after her (Ninetales), a fairy-type Pokémon with many interesting abilities that I never used before in any of my own games. Some of the interesting things about Ninetales are that it’s the first Pokemon whose move set I really didn’t like when I started playing Pokémon games back in 1998, and it has some interesting abilities in the Pokémon series that were never fully explained. For example, it can put itself to sleep by covering itself with leaves from any bush. That’s interesting enough, but how do you explain that to the player? So how about when it can shoot stars at high velocity from its body in a straight line and hit any target instantly, or turn into a shadow that can’t be seen at all (and thus be able to hide in a bush without being detected)? I think those abilities were meant to be discovered by the player and are one of the ways to get Ninetales in the first place, rather than just being an enemy, or something like that. I’ve been thinking about that, and what I might do with Ninetales in my own games. I’ll think about it some more, and maybe I’ll try to come up with some original game ideas using Ninetales. But it’s nice that Pokemon let me use it for this commission, even though the official Ninetales was never one of my favourites. It’s not really a major work of art, but I’m very happy with it. And, after I’m done with it, I’ll probably draw a few more pictures like it. I didn’t update my game-related blog yesterday, because I had a day off yesterday, so today’s update is going to be a little shorter than usual. But the topic I want to talk about today will come up in a future post, which I’m writing now and plan to post in the next day or so. So I was watching some trailers for upcoming releases over at the Official Wii Page today, and I saw a new trailer for Pokemon Universe (the next Wii game from Nintendo), which will be released on June 27, 2009, in North America and on July 30, 2009, in Europe. So I fired up my older copy of Alpha 2.5 and loaded up one of the Pokemon models in the game. I’m not really interested in playing Pokemon Universe yet, because I just got through beating up on the game, and I don’t want to play it again right away, even if the game is only a year old. But I do use Pokemon occasionally as my personal “portable” game. For example, I use it at work to pass the time while waiting for stuff to finish loading. And I was surprised by the fact that this Pokemon character’s model is basically identical to the model for the character I had been using in my own game with the same name, Ninetales. So after taking a look at both versions of the character models, and trying to figure out how the two versions of Ninetales are different, I ended up with the following findings. First of all, the face is different