I've decided that for Asylum, we'll be using SDL to manage input. The interesting thing about this decision is the Win32 hack needed to make SDL and OGRE play nice. What's got me curious, however, is if it's possible to use SDL for doing 2D graphics as an overlay above OGRE's renderings. If so, then I can avoid using CEGUI for the user interface.

As for that user interface, I'm thinking that going with a clipboard, one of those old medical chart ones, as a motif. Or maybe a flip-open (wire-ring) notebook. Have the different UI panels on pages, maybe even have the UI animated to flip through them!

Prototype 2 is taking a lot slower than I had anticipated. I want to get it working before going onto actual development. Some of what I want to do is pretty easy (adding the single-instance mutex, rudimentary input in-game), but getting the OGRE configuration files eliminated, and allowing resource overrides, and filesystem related work will be painful. It'd be awesome if OGRE actually had a nice VFS system; doing my own and integrating it with the resource system that OGRE uses isn't going to be much fun.

Another thing I've done while working on prototype 2 is an automated system for building, preparing an installer, and making a CD image. It's incomplete, but I'm hoping to get it all working nicely soon. Then I'll move it to Perl, makefile, or shell script (it's a set of batch files that call each other right now).