My goodness, how time flies... The past year has been a flurry of activity, with many major aspects of my life being tumbled around and changed up. I successfully moved back from Germany in the March timeframe, and was living in a temporary situation with my in-laws while we found a permanent house. This was a surprisingly long process, which is actually just now being finalized - we moved into the new house over the Christmas break, and are now settling in to the new area.

Of course, the year has also had a number of successes, and I have been fortunate in the work that I was able to accomplish in the past 12 month (especially given the decreased development time from the living situation...). I produced an article that will appear in GPUPro 4 when it comes out, and have continued development on Hieroglyph 3, with fairly large refinements in the architecture and the addition of some new content.

In addition to the work on the Hieroglyph 3 source code, there has also been a fairly large amount of community interaction on the project's codeplex pages. In fact, between staying on top of the codeplex discussions, and continued development on the engine itself, my interaction with GameDev.net has actually been pretty spotty this year. However, I see that situation drastically improving now that I will have a bit more stability (plus my own office from which to type up posts from - which is where this is being written!). Given this decrease in production, I wanted to thank those of you who are still reading these posts. I am intended for them to be much more lively in 2013, and they should be much more consistent as well.

I am also moving into a new position at work that will allow me to (finally!) be able to do some visualization development work. This has been a long time coming, and I can't wait to jump in head first. Of course, this should also bode well for my work on Hieroglyph since they will be at least partially intertwined. Stay tuned for more on this in the coming months.

So what plans do I have for 2013? There is a long list of items that I want to explore, and those are starting with expanding Hieroglyph 3 to run on WinRT based applications. This process has actually already started, but should continue to move forward in the next couple of weeks. Once WinRT support is there, WP8 support won't be far behind it either (as they are naturally closely related...). With this sudden increase in the number of platforms to support with Hieroglyph, there is some impetus towards a more generalized application model, which could allow each of the platforms to run the same application, but without a bunch of customized code for each platform...

This has led to the development of what I am calling 'Glyphlets'. The overall concept is fairly simple - to define a simple interface for applications which can be implemented onces, and then each platform simply needs to support the 'playing' of that interface to support running the application. It sounds simplistic at first, but it actually opens up quite a range of options once it is up and running - ranging from having multiple platforms (as just described) all the way to implementing Lua script based applications, to having applications embedded within other applications... Glyphlets will be a big topic for me in 2013, so I hope you will find them as interesting as I have so far!

So Happy New Year to all of you GameDev residents, and I wish you all a happy and prosperous year. I sincerely look forward to getting back into the community, and can't wait to share what I have been working on!