Saturday 3 April 2010

Green Shoots of Recovery

Last night, I dusted this project off, improved the staircase algorithm, and added a staircase to the Jade island.

One of the problems is the length of time each render now takes, even for a minor adjustment. However, once some new component is settled, I think it's probably going to be possible to set up a batch rendering job to produce all the renders anew, every time a significant component is added.

I have decided to inch the project forward in its incomplete state, adding as many of the individual stages of the game as possible, even based on an incomplete background picture.

For example, if a new bridge, building or piece of furniture is added to the island, then I might have to re-render a number of backgrounds later, and I might have to modify the positions of sprites to an extent, but better incomplete scenery at this stage rather than incomplete gameplay.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, yes it is a total pain when you need to add things later, I've done panoramics and well aware of lengthy render times and the "joy" it brings when something isn't quite right..
Its a shame I never did much with Java, I'd of loved to help.. now if it was AS or Lua lol

I hope things go well, don't rush into releasing early, as Douglas Adams once said:
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. :)
Take care
Nige

Daryl Van Humbeck said...

Is that kind of like a Makefile for PoV-Ray scenery?

Gil said...

nigec: Often, it helps, if you're experimenting, to comment out most of the scenery and concentrate on the new stuff.

Gil said...

Daryl: Yes, there is a way of making multiple files for an animation, by incrementing a variable. I think I can bend that concept to support a multi-scene build file.