*sigh* First Post: January 17, Second Post: February 14. But I’ve been busy, sortof.
Okay, so for starters, I’ve made a bunch of changes/fixes on the site. The most noticeable feature is the tabs at the top of pages. You can’t see it here, but go to any of the pages through the Flash header and you’ll see them in action. It looks a bit strange where there are no subpages (specifically on the contact page), but I can’t really do anything about that. The only other noticeable thing I changed was my history manager sidebar plugin (it just says ‘Post History’ here, but I coded it myself. It doesn’t look all that great when there is no post history, but once I actually post news here more often, it should look better. I’ve actually been trying to get that into the Wordpress plugin list, but the process for doing that is really complicated.
Now for the news. My latest project has been creating a new engine. My reasons for doing this were:
- In Engine 5, I had code scattered all over the place (timeline, character, individual MCs), and hundreds of comments mashed in there (mostly old code that I wasn’t sure if I would ever need). There wasn’t even any particular pattern for what code came where, which made debugging or changing something a real nightmare.
- Engine 5 was a project I started last August when I barely knew anything about Actionscript (and had to use AS1). All these archaic methods I was using were probably not very efficient, and so that needed to be changed.
- Engine 5 rain painfully slow on a regular computer. I’m talking 10-15 FPS kind of painful. It’s fine on mine, but I have 4GB of RAM and very fast processor. Since I don’t think this is going to be my target audience, I decided I needed to fix that. Unfortunately, I had no idea for what to do about the lag, other that disabling codes at random and seeing if the CPU usage went down.
So, Engine 6 is a lot more organized, uses better methods (WHILE loops instead of FOR loops), and runs fine on my old computer (which was actually fast when I first got it 5 years ago). I don’t think I’m going to put it online, since it plays a lot like the original engine (with some minor enhancements), and I think I’ll wait until I make the Inkman demo. Which I first mentioned back in December.
Oh, and one more thing. For those sites linking to me, could you please change the RSS to http://andrewanimation.biz/games/feed or just this site, as I won’t be using the old one anymore.