Is this progress? I’m not sure.
I spent this week figuring out how to make this game’s graphics happen. In brief, I discovered that OpenFL has massively different graphics architecture depending on what platform you build it for, and spent days trying to figure out what rendered quickly, what rendered slowly, how to render with the feature I wanted in a timely fashion, which of my old rendering code to keep and what to lose, etcetera.
It was frustrating. I like to know what I’m working towards. Confusion kills motivation.
Anyway, I finally determined that I should probably stick with AIR/Flash as my target platform, since performance is, for the most part, quite satisfactory. However, I still would really like to get post-processing effects working. I think my best bet at doing those at a high framerate is to build external programs in C++ (or Haxe built to C++) which the AIR application calls and feeds the screen buffer data to create the processed image. This neatly encapsulates the problem, and will allow me to handle the solution of how to turn one or more bitmaps into another bitmap in whatever manner is fastest and most efficient.
It also lets me put it off until a more opportune time so that I can get some real goddamn work done. The project has been basically stalled out for the last few weeks while I figure these things out, and so far the end result is something extremely similar to what I had before I started.
Still, do I regret spending this time porting and experimenting? Not really. It doesn’t help anything to get my head so wrapped up in the project that I cease to see alternate pathways and options. It was a learning experience if nothing else, and I think many of the programming skills I picked up will help me down the road.
Anyway, for this week, there are still some bugs in the behavior system somewhere that need to be addressed. Once I get everything working again, I’ll either finish up the detail editor or start developing the entity editor. It’s high time I got this code base feature complete. I can worry about optimizations afterwards.
It will be good to move forwards again, finally.
Wherever they went they killed the trees first. I don’t know why. I think because they wanted to make their changes, and change cannot happen where roots bind. And, one by one, and I think for the same reasons, they killed us too.
They created kings of their own to replace us. We made them all they could ask, yet they destroyed it all so they might ask for more and make it on their own.
She existed beyond their sight, though, she existed out of their reach. And, when they hunted her, they only ever found each others’ throats. Soon, they began to worship her as they did their own kings, admiring her cunning.
She didn’t care either way.
Rather than die or be enslaved, we ran to her, and she took us under her wings.
But we had forgotten that if you stop being yourself you start to become something else, and the more days, months, years, we spent in her shadow…
The more we became a part of it.
