Tidbits

Yes, I am still alive in my nerdcave. This is going to be a very quick run-down of some random morsels of progress information.

Hmm. Well, I’m up to present a technical update. Some items that register as pretty small-time on the excitement scale this time around, but important stuff nonetheless.

•The resource management and game asset loading system has been completely overhauled.
I decided to redesign from the ground up to make something more flexible for the long term, and more automated. Instead of a system that loads image by image, audio file by audio file, etc, and is set up with manual data lists, all game assets are now automatically discovered, serialized and compiled into a set of data files as part of the project build. In game, assets are loaded and parsed from these custom data files as needed, and not accessed directly by file. The new resource management system removes some pesky limitations on acceptable sprite sizes that stuck around in the old system too.

•Refactoring
I won’t get into details, but there’s been a lot of refactoring and cleaning of the code in general as well. It’s a sin that I kind of made a big mess of the codebase during the manic crunch period before the Megabooth submission; I’ve spent a considerable amount of time sorting it out since. The beast needed to be tamed before it got any worse.

•Sprite interface
I reworked the sprite data interface as well. A lot more sprite manipulation routines have been put into the game to handle real time creation and placement of sprite outlines and palette swapping mentioned in my previous post some number of weeks ago. With this in place, I’m very close to jumping back into pure gameplay coding.

•Bugs
Lastly, bug fixes; nothing too exciting here. There were some lingering hit detection problems with airborne bruisers due to issues in how the bounding boxes were being calculated for fists, feet, and stuff that causes damage on collision, but that’s all nice now. Some small camera bugs have also been tweaked out. There were some random memory leaks happening with temporary animation objects that would pop up, animate, and then disappear (oil splashes as the like), and those are all cleaned up now.