A bunch of little technical updates today.

First, I’ve updated the VectorStorm engine so that it’ll compile successfully against iOS SDK v4.3.  I’ve also got both the standard VectorStorm Testbeds and MMORPG Tycoon 2 compiling under the newly released XCode 4.  My opinion of XCode 4 is complicated;  I can understand the general outcry from many developers, but there’s lots of cool stuff in there too.  Whether the cool stuff outweighs the concerns, I’m not really sure.  But for the next couple of days, I’ll be using XCode 4 as my day-in day-out compiler to see how well I adapt.

Second, I’ve begun implementing some threading primitives into VectorStorm.  These are not yet compiling under Windows (since Microsoft has an entirely different threading model than UNIX-based systems), but I do now have both mutexes and threads working under OS X.  I’ll get the Windows version working tomorrow.  These little tools are going to be critical for MMORPG Tycoon 2, due to the amount of processing that it has to do;  it’s just going to be a lot easier to put some of that work into a separate thread.

Do be aware, though, that none of the rest of VectorStorm is written to be threadsafe.  These multithreading classes should really only be used for simple tasks that don’t involve calling into the various VectorStorm libraries at all.  If you have lots of calculations to be done in the background, then that’s fine.  But probably best not to try to allocate memory or start playing sounds from inside a thread or anything.  :)