Hi folks,
meanwhile nearly everything changed
I was redesigning the whole architecture from pure OOP (fail due to performance) to a hybrid of DOD and OOP. Now, pure DOD is used for the core systems such as physics and rendering. A hybrid of DOD and OOP is used for less performance-critical systems such as input.
Also I started writing unit tests for nearly everything I can imagine. So the entire physics system's testing code is as large as the physics itself - but covering many edge cases. Because I totally rewrote the systems, using those unit tests I discovered bugs which might have shoot off my entire leg
The old code was out-dated referring to coding style, so rewriting and redesigning everything from scratch was a lot easier ^^
So meanwhile, I also stepped back to topdown perspective in order to simplicity during development. I use predefined vertex definitions (parsed from files) to describe 2d terrain- and object-"meshes" built from triangles. It isn't looking like before but it's working for development purpose ^^
Here's a short video of a performance test: I was hitting spacebar to spawn 500 "flying" chests (they're handled as bullet objects for testing purpose) at once. Hitting the spacebar agains spawns another 500, hitting return removes all objects (except the player). This is some kind of performance test to check out how many objects can be handled by the game in current release mode
on my netbook. So, looking back to the "old days"-code (as above), I eliminated many performance issues by moving to a more DOD-like design.
But the, here's the video. Enjoy!
Technical Stuff: It's using C++11 (now, really ^^), SFML 2.2, Thor 2.0 and my own extension SfmlExt (which can be found at my signature below all posts) for further implementations, which aren't covered by SFML of Thor (not covered at or all not in the way I'd like to).
About further dev steps: I'm going to finish documentation and unit testing within the next weeks. So reimplementing the lighting system and writing a simple audio system will be the next steps after documentation and testing
About the visuals: I decided to simplify, because everything is easier if you don't focus too much on graphics. Because I'm a totally newbie to graphics design, I'd need a graphics artist for the dev team. But that is totally unecessary at the current state of development. So I'll stick with this for a while. But I'm also now sure whether staying at topdown or going back to isometric perspective is better. Future will show!
