Projects

Hello,

I reached a milestone last week, for the first time, the program now actually loads and displays information from a level of the game. If you select a game to play from the main menu, it will load and display the background for the first desert level.

Having acheived that small but significant step, I went back and optimized some of the code:

There are four different fonts used at various points by the game, each having different sizes, different kerning, and being layed out differently on the textures. Where before I handled this with 3 different font drawing routines, I have rationalized it all down into 1 function to streamline things a little. At the same time I added in the kerning information which I had previously left out as a low-priority issue. As a result, the text layout matches the original considerably better.

Another place where I was able to streamline the code was in handling the screen fades. Previously this was done with a black, blended polygon which covered the screen when needed. Instead I now use glColor to fade all textures as they are drawn. On the Windows platform, this greatly reduces the screen overdraw and leads to a significant improvement in graphics bandwidth use. On the Dreamcast, the consequences are more significant. Blending is a slow process for the pvr tile-engine, and blend polygons occupy their own polygon list. By removing the need for blends, I can render all the polygons as punch-thrus and avoid having to switch lists altogether. This improves performance, and streamlines the code.

My target this week, is to build the game play code, into a stack structure, so that it is possible to play a secret level in its entirety and then return to the original level, where you left off. To test this, I'll also have to implement some sort of movement, (without collision detection at this stage) and also level changes triggered by the exit, or by the clock expiry.

Thank you for listening.