Scott T: The Blog
"P" is for Progress
Posted Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 9:45pm by ScottTagged: games, programming
Thought I'd do some commentary on what's happened since those screenshots last Wednesday. I was initially going to title it "F is for Frustrating" but thought I'd let the images do the talking, but since then I think I've gotten things under control. Firstly, it turns out the massive slowdowns was due to the inefficient method of LZSS decompression I'd used. After switching that over, the frames flew along quite nicely. I had also decided to tidy up the code by a rewrite using XNA which is where the graphical glitches came in. For the most part they were just logic issues ("<" rather than ">" and so on) but after some tweaking, I was getting more and more frequent crashes!
I'm not completely sure where these were coming but after re-rewriting back to the trusty ol' SdlDotNet (and some complaining about going round in circles) I appear to now have a very stable executable :D In other areas, basic load/save functions exist although names don't work yet. Mouse interaction works although I'm not sure when to remove some of the hotspots which can lead to glitches when clicked on. Also, although puzzles work (see below - the lighter squares represent a hotspot) the transparencies relating to piece movements currently don't.
Spookypeanut hasn't been idle either with t7gre either with decoding of the script file formats allowing much of this progress to occur. The ScummVM Groovie engine that he started on has also gained much of this same functionality thanks to the work of jvprat :)
Hopefully more progress follows soon.