It's been a fragmented week for coding, but with two of us on the case we've covered a surprising amount of ground in re-working the engine ready for the core restructuring work and optimizations. We are currently at what you would call the foundation layer to test the very basics of the rendering and CPU profiles, and with a single logo and some text we are clocking over 7000 frames per second which is a little extreme.
In other news, our character artist continues to create new content for future releases, which this week saw the creation of our Barbarian character. The great news is that we have prepared him as character creator parts so you can mix and match when you get hold of this model. We will also create a few pre-created Barbarians so you can also just drop one in and go.
We also found time to test the most recent release, and found a little time to experiment with high specular and lighting in this cool moon base shot below:
Work continues next week on performance as we move from foundation work and onto the actual core loops. We are hoping to see gains almost right away, and from that increased start we can begin optimizing via profilers and some n-core technology. It won't be seven thousand frames per second, but we should see a mark improvement in game speed over the next few weeks plus a much cleaner project area for us, which means faster bug fixes and quicker feature implementations!