Sunday, March 10, 2013
Summary
I wasn't very happy this morning when I realized that someone had stolen an hour from the day, in what was clearly an underhanded attempt to make my already-unusually-short Sunday even shorter So, I did what any reasonable person would do: I mounted an attack on time itself. I'm very pleased to report that it went well, and, as a result, I've logged record hours for a Sunday. Take that, daylight savings time
Lots of great stuff happened today, but one of the most exciting was a huge performance gain!!! I was noticing that pulses were taking up a lot of resources during large battles (understandably, since hundreds of them are being created and destroyed each second). I'm not sure what possessed me to try it, but I decided to change the memory allocation scheme for pulses to use something called a pool allocator, which is generally a good idea for things that are numerous and are created/destroyed often. I could never have expected the result....somewhre between a 50-100% performance gain!!! Wow, that's simply massive!!! The battle of 50 ships that I was testing on went from being a bit of an unsteady 45 to 60 FPS to being consistently 100+ FPS One step closer to massive battles!!!
Since I was on a roll with technical things, I decided to take a plunge into the secret sauce that LT uses to make objects look extremely detailed even at very close distances. I ended up vastly improving the quality of the algorithm, and it resulted in significantly more detailed looking objects! Guess what the trick was? Exponential falloff Go figure.
Other than these great technical achievements, I did a boatload of work with the interface today - no, not just internal work, but actually using the blasted thing to make stuff. I'm getting a better and better idea of how I want the menus in the game to work. Today, in particular, I had a few breakthroughs and am now really excited about them!!! Remember when I said I would be thanking myself for that interface overhaul? Well, it's already begun. I am starting to see patterns and paradigms in interface design that I never would have seen with the other systems. It's absurd how quickly this new one allows me to throw together highly-functional, complex interfaces that look great. I am already thanking crazy-ripping-code-out Josh for his good work on burning the old version at the stake
Somehow, I have a feeling that someone...perhaps my body...is going to make me pay back the hours that I stole today...which could conceivably mean less hours tomorrow...we'll see. For the time being, I'm really happy to have gotten off to such a great start to the week!
March Josh: making January Josh and February Josh look like lazy sloths. Yeahhh
Hour Tally
Coding: 8.67
Internet: 2.54
Testing: 2.92
Thinking: 0.41
Total Logged Time: 14.55
Post
Sun Mar 10, 2013 11:46 pm
#1
Week of March 10, 2013
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford