Hey gang, got a few more cool improvements done the last few days:
- Audio resources have traditional been loaded dynamically as needed. While this has made resource management easier, it meant that there was a huge pause of a few seconds when a large file, like a song, was loaded. I’ve moved all that into another thread now, which means loading a song will not pause the game anymore. It also means that the first time a sound effect is played, like an explosion, it is delayed. This effect however can be mitigated by preloading these resources into memory.
- I’ve internally reorganized how video settings are stored so that they can be saves and loaded to disk. Although there is no option yet to change VSync or the display resolution in game, I have the backend infrastructure in place to handle it now.
- I’ve implemented Frame Buffer Objects in my graphical engine. An FBO is a way for me to render to something besides the screen, like a texture or stencil buffer. These can be used in a lot of cool ways such as…
- We now have a functioning minimap. Actually it’s just meant to act as a radar showing you where other ships are and it does not show the terrain. Your ship is white and always centered, teammates are green and enemies are red. It doesn’t look fancy but honestly I don’t want to get too crazy with it. I like the notion of a space ship reflecting nautical culture so making it look like a sonar screen is my ultimate goal.