Tuesday Cave Dwelling

The Mound Rises

Since the fateful decision was made to go into official obsession mode over Reloaded, it's been a blast.  That said, it is also apparent that small jobs that would otherwise have been done as a matter of course are now piling up nicely in a mound of todo's. Some of them actually quite substantial product releases too :)

Rather than revert to the old ways, I have decided to block book Thursday to do all those tasks and get the inbox clear and all Lee related matters resolved.  Some developers can happily bounce between a few different projects, but I find the going quite slow when I do that. There is a certain amount of re-acquainting with the subject matter before you can get into a rhythm and then of course you change records again.  At least confining all the potential distractions to one day caps each end and contains the matter.

Reloaded Progress So Far

I now have segments, overlays, entities and lights being added and removed using the new object system and the real time light mapping adjusting the map in the background without slowing down proceedings. A great result for what was simply a theory a few months ago.

I also solved a few crash issues caused by the light mapper lighting objects in the background, which where then deleted by me as it was happening, meaning it would be using data that had been deleted elsewhere. This is a common problem when writing multi-core software and something I should be on my guard for. Now I simply hide the objects until the process is complete and the threads finished, and then I can delete them safely.

Right now I am battling with deleting lights and having that event trigger more lighting in the background. Once I have the full gamut of adding and deletion when editing sorted, and hiding the markers in the main test mode, I should be ready to move on a little.

Small But Vital Tweak

One little change I made while playing with entity placement was for the cursor to remember the actual position of the entity before you attach it to your mouse cursor. This way, when you click to drag an entity it no longer jumps position to centre on the mouse pointer and instead stays put. This means micro changes can be made using the top down view without the frustration of constantly having to re-position every entity you lift off the map. It's a small change, but really improves the editing process.

Signing Off

It's 4PM now so a few more hours of lovely toil and then we'll be further along. The next thing I want to do is a good player control system so I can move, strafe, jump, mouse look and manouver like a good 'un. Taking inspiration from a few of the FPS games I have installed will help in this, and before I add bullet physics I want to have a basic player control system in place so I can see how the physics affects it once implemented.  The physics will be an exciting chunk of work, but I want to completely finish the light mapping stuff so I don't have to come back in a months time to fix things. Better do it now while it is fresh in my mind.