This is part of a blog series to document the evolution of this community, year over year.

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Wii Opera SDK's Expansion

Much of this year's focus was on the expanded capabilities of the Wii Opera SDK. With its growth, it needed its own website, so WiiOperaSDK.com went live on January 28th.

The initial excitement of HB Online started to abate, as competition from WiiCade's advancing API allowed for more advanced Flash mini-games on the Wii. Jerason Banes, Smalls, and some other the other early Internet Channel developers, and I, continued to stay in touch on My Opera's forums and share our ideas.

The SDK itself gained capabilities in the first half of the year (2.x) for developers to texture map triangles, import 3D meshes, produce real-time shadows and lighting, and generate raycasted dungeons.

To promote version 2.x of the Wii Opera SDK, I posted two widgets on Opera's website: A scaled down version of the dungeon demo and a demo of the 3D mesh handling. The latter won runner-up in Opera's You Got Skills widget competition on March 10th, which had a prize of an Opera goodie bag (T-shirt, 2 pens, and a lanyard).

In the second half of the year (3.x series) came several speed optimizations and code enhancements, along with a multi-user communication API (later dropped).

The website gained numerous tech demos and a game called Shooting, which allows using the Wii Remote pointer control to shoot a moving target.

For a few months, the homepage interface was replaced with a raycasting dungeon as the main menu, but this was later moved to the demo section so that users of older browsers (and Internet Explorer) would not be blocked access to the website. The mesh gallery and the dungeon generator apps came at this time, as well. Although the latter never garnered much interest, some of the mesh gallery's content was later integrated into other projects across the community.