Nada (Zero Engine Experiments)

February 18th, 2015 (6th grade)

Nada is a trove of tools and hacks for DigiPen’s proprietary(?) Zero Engine.

While Unity has a rich ecosystem of tools, tweaks, and, if push comes to shove, plugins, Zero has little in the way of a store full of components. Nada was my attempt to fix that.

Zero Engine was not open source at the time so unless I wanted to port my game to another engine, I had no choice but to hack in the features I needed (in this case, a video player). I implemented lossless and then lossy video using nothing but Zero’s scripting language Zilch.

While the final product was somewhat impractical (its compression doesn’t come close to “real” video encoding standards such as H.264) it taught me a lot about video compression and image processing.