Development continues, sort of. I continue to be frustrated at how slowly things are progressing, even as I reassure myself that these are mere temporary setbacks. It is very easy to recognize, in oneself, a determination that something be completed. I am in love with this project (this is why I don’t have a real job), and determined to work on it, determined to see it through to completion.
The problem is, that sort of determination is, without context, pretty empty. I can declare my devotion, but until I declare the boundaries of my commitment, declare what I will do and, most importantly, when, that devotion is nothing more than an emotional exercise.
For all the problems the institution may have, this might be why we have marriages.
Anyhoo. I’ve got a new computer up and running, and I can send my old one to get fixed as soon as I pull the data off of its HDD. This new machine is a) cheaper and b) more energy efficient, so I may feel more comfortable taking it with me and do more development on the go. That is the hope, anyway.
As frustrated as I may be, I don’t want to overstate the case. There has been some progress, even as difficult as it has been to pay as much attention to this as it deserves. I’ve been looking into some optimization in terms of the level rendering, and architected a simple caching system to speed things up which is mostly operational now. I’ve been taking steps to make the whole thing hypothetically resolution-independent, and at the same time started targeting 1920×1080 resolution since that’s becoming pretty much standard now. At that resolution, it’s running at about 80 frames per second in debug mode and 100 in release mode, but obviously there’s still a lot of work to be done which will likely slow things down. Still, this gives me hope that making a HD game in Actionscript that runs well is not completely implausible.
On the flip side, now that I’m not focused completely on the map editor any more, I’m noticing a lot of the old stuff which I’d considered done still needs a lot of work. For whatever reason, the level editor runs incredibly slowly compared to the rest of the game– about 30 frames per second just rendering the level, dropping down below 20 if I select a big area of the level. All of this wouldn’t matter too much since it’s just a level editor, but it also causes interface lag which makes it really difficult to work with. Also, a couple of editing options weren’t properly integrated into the undo function, so those will need to be updated as well.
Yeah. Past me sucks. That chump needs to eat some programming pills so he can suck less.
So, okay, for next update I’m going to get the level editor back up to speed and make sure it’s more stable. After that, and also probably in time for the next update, I will put the finishing touches on the map editor. We have a context for dedication, we have a timeframe for commitment.
Oh shit. I’d better get to work.
