Speiger
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Reentering and Reevaluating
🕑 Added 2020-04-12 21:45:41 +0000 UTCWell it's been some time since I was coding on my game engine.
Around 5-6 Months depending on what I count and what I don't count.
So since the beginning/early March I went back to my Game Engine, having some other Projects behind me that taught me a lot, showing me that I had some foundation flaws.
First of all the UI was taking to much time to implement features. What decided "yet another rewrite" of the UI was actually ThinMatrixes new Game engine, he has a similar but smaller Project going on and he showed me indirectly the flaws that my UI had.
So Scrap what was there and rewrite everything UI wise. This is also the reason I didn't do middle posts on this because I didn't want to stress myself over something I knew how to do.
So I rewrote my UI.
First the renderer needed a overhaul. Yes it was Flexible, very powerful, but on Weak CPUs it would take to long because I was doing "Matrix4x3" calculation on there for every vertex.
Why? Because I wanted a certain set of features that required that.
In the end I basically made the Matrix-calculation optional and had a simplified version of it.
Slow but full Transform Control Code:
Fast but limited Transform Code:
After that was implemented and some tests showed me that everything was working.
I started implementing some features from ThinMatrixes current engine.
The Constrain and Animation System.
That was a rather difficult task since his UI is based around the fact that he works with fractions while my code works with Pixels. On top of that his code required that all constrains were always present while I wanted "optional constrains" since I might only need a width or a position constrain for alignments.
The same issue was present for animations, but after understanding his code I managed to implement it for my system.
After that Font-rendering became the next bigger thing. The old system worked fine but I wanted to simply the code because it was to complex to add anything, but also using it got hard when I wanted to do something outside the normal way.
After try and error (which I did over the span of a week) I managed to implement a system that simplified a lot of code kept the "Per character Modifiers" and improved the Parsing speed. (Parsing from text to vertex data)
On top of that a lot of helper-functions do now work better because of this unification and simplification.
Text are no longer a self contained system but are actually now a component with bounds.
This simplifies a lot of functions and allows also to easier implement multi line text.
On top of that changes to parent components or text itself can be now easier detected since its now a proper component now.
Next was to re-implement the UI Components, which was easier/harder as it looked because of bugs during the initial components in the entire system. (Without testing its hard to find issues)
But after these initial issues were fixed my to do list finished quicker then expected.
After that the essential Windows were added for profiling. (Pie Profiler, Tree Profiler and just FPS etc)
Instead of a list I used a tree because it is a lot more useful for these kind of tree structures.
And thanks to a previous project I knew how to implement a Proper Tree-view.
Now to the stuff I am working on right now first of all a Actual to do list with Proper steps etc.
Besides that I am rewriting core parts of my engine moving them to a "core-engine" part so they are no longer conflicting with each other. Making them self-contained.
This is the current Proper Version 0.1 to do list which is all the stuff I worked on since I started coding on this project again. I am not planning as far ahead right now because I am horrible at planning that far, but small goals are listed and there is a side area where I write down all the bigger things that need to be looked at.
Right now I am basically overhauling the entire engine which I did before and before because new issues crept up. This way I am doing right now is plan features that are definitely needed and keep it simple and self contained that way expanding is a lot easier.
These are right now the Elements I try to split from the Engine.
It's not a perfect list at all, but provides a rough process of what I try to do.
Right now I have almost the Vector Library split from the entire thing which were a good chunk of things because this thing is at some points excessive but now its almost self contained. Since there aren't a lot of good Vector Libraries out there I am thinking of making this Opensource. I am not sure about that yet but time will tell.
Sorry that I was gone for so long, other projects just took over my interest and it seemed to me I needed a different project to get a new better view on this.
I have not set a new date on when the next post comes since I noticed yes a date is good to keep motivation high, on the other hand I am right now planning more with features.
So the next post will be most likely after I overhauled another bigger piece of my engine.
Anyways Thanks for reading
Speiger
