I’m doing a terrible job of sticking to the schedule I came up with. I keep getting sidetracked by new tasks, improvements or things I forgot to put on the schedule. This last month, I finally got around to looking up what sorts of multi-threading solutions are available in Haxe/AIR. It turns out that Adobe AIR has supported multi-threading for a while now, with an implementation that is both very straightforward and kind of frustrating. AIR’s version of multi-threading is: Load another AIR program into your running program, and pass values back and forth. Simple enough in concept, but it still has all the traditional concerns of multi-threading with sharing resources and managing access.
So, much of this past month has been taken up with trying to get my particle system, the most demanding discrete subsystem of EverEnding, running in a separate thread. It took a lot of thought and experimentation to figure out a way to restructure a system which had presumed open access to a shared memory pool and make it run remotely with operations mediated by a single point of communication. After a week or two I got it running, but… not especially well. The benefit of the new system is a bump from 45fps to 50fps, which is not as dramatic or life-changing as I’d hoped — plus, for some reason, there are spikes of 30-50ms, which make the overall effect still somewhat disjointed and unpleasant. Still, I think these problems will be fixable, though it may be tricky to figure out exactly how they’re manifesting.
Aside from that I’ve mostly been working on building out the last section of the first area, the caves. I think I’m finally starting to nail down a paradigm of tile design for this game, based around the idea of areas which are lit, areas which are dark, and areas which are somewhere in between. Lit areas are mostly on the upper right and dark areas mostly on the lower left, with various transitional tiles to make them flow smoothly from one to the next. The cave tileset is starting to come together, though certain tiles still need some work. The background could use some improvement as well.
Also, looking back through my daily devblog notes, apparently I worked on collision in February as well. Strange, it feels like much more than a ago now. Well, most of the collision improvements are in place and working, but in the process some things broke, so those will need to be re-fixed. It’s basically guaranteed that any time I work on collision code I’ll end up frustrated.
So what’s next? I’ll probably focus on developing the level architecture and tilesets until I’m completely done with the caves, then go back and focus on populating this first area with enemies and details. Along the way somewhere I’ll spend a few days fixing all the things I broke getting the new particle system implemented and see if I can fix weird glitches there, as well as maybe a bit more collision work (sigh).