{"id":1742,"date":"2010-11-10T21:44:41","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T10:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=1742"},"modified":"2010-11-10T22:03:33","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T11:03:33","slug":"so-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2010\/11\/10\/so-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"So, updates."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Okay guys, so here&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on with me right now.<\/p>\n<p>I was offered one paying job, which I&#8217;ve turned down (it was a difficult decision, but in the end I just decided that it wasn&#8217;t the right thing for me right now). \u00a0The downside of this is, of course, that I still have no income coming in for the foreseeable future. \u00a0But on the plus side, I&#8217;ve saved up enough money over the years that I&#8217;m not in immediately dire financial peril while I look for more work. \u00a0I&#8217;ve applied to a few places, and am still waiting for replies from them. \u00a0Cross your fingers for me. \u00a0:)<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, I&#8217;ve switched gears on my home stuff. \u00a0I&#8217;ve temporarily set MMORPG Tycoon 2 to one side, and have begun to work on an iPhone game instead. \u00a0I&#8217;m expecting development on it to take about a month full time, followed by a little more time to get graphics and sound wrangled. \u00a0Add a few weeks to go through the approvals process, and we&#8217;re looking at potentially being saleable sometime around the end of the year (Probably later, since I assume that Apple lets their approvals people have some time off at the end of the year, so approvals are likely to be extremely slow around that time). \u00a0The goal is for this game to do well enough to pay for at least part of this period of unemployment. \u00a0Will it manage that? \u00a0Who knows? \u00a0But it&#8217;ll be fun finding out. \u00a0:)<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s always good to run your game engine in a clean codebase from time to time, to show you what actually works and what just appeared to be working, based upon the single codebase it was developed inside.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll eventually post more about this game I&#8217;m writing, but at the moment I really need to be spending most of my time on coding, rather than blogging. \u00a0So apologies in advance if I&#8217;m not posting daily screenshots or etc for the next little bit.<\/p>\n<p>Fun stuff today:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Discovered that my current development branch of the VectorStorm library crashes and burns if you try to draw anything 2D through the standard rendering pipeline. \u00a0Absolutely every 2D object in MMORPG Tycoon 2 had provided a custom ::Draw() function, and so I never noticed the problem. \u00a0But as soon as I started working in a clean codebase, it was crashing like mad. \u00a0Relatively easy to fix the problem, though.<\/li>\n<li>Discovered that although I had implemented this fancy &#8220;Fragment&#8221; system which allowed the renderer to group rendering operations together based upon render state settings, there was no way to use that system without writing custom rendering code. \u00a0So today I added the ability to create and use an arbitrary number of Fragments from a sprite or model data file. \u00a0This also added support for storing data on the video card, with that data specified from within the data file, instead of from within code. \u00a0And this also also added support for specifying a full hierarchy of named sprites based upon just a single data file, which was never possible before. \u00a0This change was huge; \u00a0opens up all of the performance improvements to games which have statically created models and data, rather than the procedurally generated ones being used in MT2.<\/li>\n<li>Also, I got to write some really neat camera code. \u00a0Have I mentioned that I like writing camera code? \u00a0It&#8217;s one of my special subjects, and one of the big reasons why I&#8217;m probably never going to leave the professional video game industry; \u00a0I&#8217;d never get to write camera code again if I was working at (for example) a bank. \u00a0And no amount of money is worth that. \u00a0:)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>(Edit: \u00a0And no, the job I turned down wasn&#8217;t at a bank. \u00a0That was just an example.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay guys, so here&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on with me right now. I was offered one paying job, which I&#8217;ve turned down (it was a difficult decision, but in the end I just decided that it wasn&#8217;t the right thing for me right now). \u00a0The downside of this is, of course, that I still have no&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-s6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}