DaveSilver's blog

So it's been a while since I posted anything to this blog. I hope you guys haven't missed me too much. This week has been pretty eventful. The last three days Kevin and I have been working to integrate the animation stuff into the Game Engine that he and Jlew made. This was a large task but not a vastly challenging one. It was more about determining the exact process we would use and doing that for everything, than it was about figuring out a unique process for each situation.

As you may be able to guess from my blog title I have been running into more issues while trying to integrate my stuff into Jlew and Blitzkev's engine. Mainly we are having issues getting things to display because the entire engine has not yet been ported over to the new system. This means that some things are using our sprite and sprite group system while other things are using the old blit and flip method. For some reason this is causing the stuff to not display the same way every time we test and thus makes it very hard for us to pin down the exact issues we are having.

So today I finally finished all of the classes and functions of the animation system. My next task is to integrate all of the classes into the game engine that Jlew and BlitzKev have built. This task is pretty hefty and will probably take a day or so to complete. It involves me finding every location where my stuff would be used and then figuring how best to make it work in those locations. It's a big task but I know I am up to it.

So we officially have only three weeks left to finish this project. That seems like a small amount but I think we are pretty much on track for that. Last week we discovered that using the images object type was a bad idea and decided we needed to convert our system to using sprites. Thankfully this does not require too much hard work on our end. I am currently working towards this goal.

So today we worked on getting our system working so that we would not have to refresh everything on screen every single frame. We were pretty successful.

So yesterday was primarily successful however towards the end of the end we started running into some problems. Basically as we got to the end of the day we found that some of the methods we were using, or planning on using, were not going to be as successful as we thought. You see, we intended to use a "dirty" update method. This means that instead of updating the whole screen every frame, it only updates the areas covered by objects that actually need to be updated. To do this, we would simply create a list of the rectangle objects associated with what needs to be updated.

So yesterday we finally implemented rotation correctly and it looks great. Once we had that down we also implemented Rendered Transparency so that users could make more complex looking images, and the convert function so that images can be optimized more easily. After we got that working we moved on to determining how we would implement the animation classes into the larger Game Engine.

So a new week has begun and we are still getting rotation to work. We have a few ideas and supposedly JT got pretty far on it last Thursday but, with me not being in the FOSS Box that day, we were not able to truly work together. He has not come in yet but will probably be here soon and thus we will be able to bang out this final piece of the "puzzle". Beyond that we will also be working on integrating our system with Jlew's game engine today. We are scheduled to have a meeting sometime today on how they can work together.

So last night I got food poisoning when I ate some sour fruit and because of that I was not able to physically be at the Foss Box today. Despite that I was still able to get some work done. Basically yesterday I spent the whole day building the Scene class which was the final piece that needed to be completed of the animation system. With the code complete I spent today running tests to make sure things work and to make sure there was nothing I did wrong. Obviously I did do stuff wrong at first but it has now all been fixed and the class is fully functional.

So as of last night the animation systems are in a pretty good place. I have most of it done and am moving on to the final piece today. Overall things are going pretty well with it so far. The rotation stuff is still giving us problems but we have decided to put it on hold until we have everything else complete. This way we will not be held up by it and fall behind schedule. I expect that once we get away from the problem and stop thinking so much about it we will come up with a solution because that's just how these things tend to go but who knows.