Monday, August 24, 2009

No shadows in 1.7!

I've decided that they're going to have to wait on the next full version. I have pretty big plans for restructuring the entire main render in order to get things cleaner and more consistent across the board, and so I don't want to add in even more code right now that's going to need to be rewritten when I come to that.

I've done some experimental work on this restructuring already, which has mostly involved planning it out on paper and writing some skeleton code in a standalone app. It's enough to satisfy me that the structure is sound and the approach is valid. The next thing to do will be to fork off a branch of the 1.7 code base and work on that. I'm intending that I'll have almost everything I need isolated in a single module, so that I can just bring it in and then make the necessary changes elsewhere.

The main remaining thing to do with 1.7 is a whole batch of testing, but I'm going to back away from it a little for maybe the rest of this week before starting on that. Sometimes one can get too close to one's own code that one can't see obvious things that need attention, and taking the opportunity to view it from a distance is the best thing to do.

Testing will primarily involve SDA demos and some gameplay, although I have been using it for general play quite a bit during development. Maybe towards mid/end next week we'll be in release country, assuming of course that nothing blows up. That's roundabout 2nd or 3rd September, folks!

1 comments:

xaGe said...

..Your thinking is sound! Why do something a second or 3rd time just for the sake of having it in the next release. Better to wait out of the shadows, haven't even tried to use them in DirectQ anyway..heh