It's been a little quiet on the news front of late - most of the work has been under the hood which is somewhat harder to post news post about. Nonetheless, here's an overview as to what I've been up to.
More than three quarters of these items on my 'pre-alpha checklist' are now complete with work continuing at a good pace and things are coming together nicely.
From a coding prospective, after spending a fair few hours pouring over game logic timing outputs like the one above, the AI and logic processing now far better utilise the available execution time between each game 'tick' thanks to some new time slicing code and a number of general enhancements. There is still a bit of work to be done on the enemy AI but all the basic behaviour is in place already. The underlying game engine also has received tweaks and enhancements.
Along with this, I got the profiler working (finally) in Visual Studio. It turns out it was well worth the couple of hours of less than polite rhetorical muttering and painstaking fiddling as, once I managed to get Isomer instrumented and running, I discovered a few surprising hotspots in the code relating to pathfinding calculation and weapon projectile iteration. These are now fixed and the result is the game runs better especially on less powerful hardware.
More artwork has been completed too, with new and updated block and item sprites making their way into the game. Music is also coming along nicely with one track completed and one well under way.
