Trapped Dev Update 16

Where to start? I haven’t written about Trapped! in a long time. Lots of things happened and lots of things didn’t happen. In real life we were working on our house, moving stuff around, redecorating and stuff. Also, I played a lot of Super Mario Galaxy and updated my PC. This was accompanied by hardware failures, sound problems, video card crashes and after I dropped my external USB hard drive I nearly lost all my music and photo’s. Needless to say, I had a lot on my mind these past few months.

Still, a pause of nearly 4 months? I was kind of shocked when I realized how long I hadn’t been programming or thinking about Trapped! The game has not been abandoned though. In fact, I recently picked it up again. I looked at the code and thought: oh dear, this is rather complicated and overdone. Let’s see what went wrong (and right)

• I tried to implement a generic particle engine to service all my special effects and object movement. This doesn’t work as there are always exceptions to how a particle must behave and you have to build that into the generic system, which automatically makes it un-generic
• My timing code was a mess. The code was doing things at the wrong time, too often or not at all.
• Graphics wise I still really like it. I will continue along those lines, but…
• Too many left overs (glowing lines, vector graphics) from the Thrust and Grid Assault code.

So here is what will happen (or has already happened)

• Re-write the timing code, make sure the right things happen at the right time and in the right amount. My new particle engine is already using the new timing code and performance wise it seems to be working out.
• Re-write the particle engine, using images instead of lines and vector objects. I already did this and my tests show that I can draw and move around 4000 particles before I see a drop in FPS. Nice. Using more images has made it possible for me to add more variety in the explosions which do look nice now. Adding frames with more than one spark or debris in it will also create the illusion of even more particles so I will use less particles than I do now.
• Separate the movement of the other game objects (player, bullets) from the particle engine. In some way this already has happened because the particle engine has been removed and re-written. The rest of the game is broken now but I will get to that eventually.

Having taken a break from this game has sure made some things clear for me and I hope I can keep the code and the methods I am using more simple from now on. So to all you folks who still come around to this blog too see what’s going on with the game: thanks, and I hope you will not be disappointed with the end result

Still, not programming for a while sure does force you to reacquaint yourself with the code and the language it has been written in… I needed some time to re-adjust myself to the code and game programming.

Have you ever stopped doing something for some time and then found out it was hard to get back into it? I also had this problem when I started playing the guitar again, so I should not have been surprised…