Week Eight / Day Two

Today went fairly well. I wasn't able to work the entire day as I had to get my car inspected (passed!), but I did manage to take care of the next step, which is file I/O from within visual studio. All is not 100% though, as it seems I have a bit of a problem when not running within visual studio's debugger. However, I can run from within visual studio, so it is probably just some file access quirk regarding the working directory (I have no file checking, sorry Dr. Liston). It's all about the quick and dirty right now, just getting stuff to work, so being able to load levels is a big enough step for me. I also quickly threw together the code to handle some keyboard input, so 1-4 handles changing the colors of the ship.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, my engine's runtime is not decoupled from the speed of the graphics capabilities of the system. Therefore, the faster it renders, the faster the game plays. Which means the first time I tested changing the ships color, it freaked out pretty good. It's ugly, but I implemented a simple frame lock to force updates at 60 fps. Right now it flickers like crazy. I think there is some smoothing or buffering going on with the iPhone that I'm not getting on the PC, and so far trying to just enable double buffering with a buffer swap at the end of scene rendering has left me stranded. So as it stands I can load levels and control the ship, but in all honesty it looks like crap. Here's to tomorrow.