Skip to content

March 16th, 2014

March 16th, 2014 published on

We’re getting pretty close to getting Update 3 playable to make a report, but it has been slow going. Due to the large number of fundamental changes there were quite a few bugs, and no one has felt like testing it all that much for some reason. Most of that is on me for getting distracted with a certain video game that just came out and not putting much work into implementing what we have of the new interface which then proceeded to bum Sew out.

For that matter I’ve been bummed out about the game itself this week in general because it just doesn’t seem like changes will actually improve it that much. It’s a pretty common thread to see making of articles have lines like “even early on you could tell it was fun!”. Which is, well, worrisome when you aren’t fun early on. Most making of articles that cover struggles to make something fun usually end in “and then they scrapped it and that’s why it ended up good” or “and that’s why this game sucks”. Of course this isn’t actually true, lots of things have only come together in the end. But when you’re sitting in it, it gets discouraging every now and then.

Last night Sew also pointed out a desire to add some animations to the interface. This is problematic since our UI library doesn’t directly support animation of any kind, so I need to extend it (and to be fair it’s made for extending it when it comes to stuff like this). But the documentation on said library isn’t fantastic and it looks to be a rather daunting task. There’s also a second problem with said library that I can’t really get it to achieve a certain effect I want. So, again, have to extend it or scrap it. I also worry a bit about layering issues for certain animations since like most game UI libraries this thing has to draw on top of the game. There’s also the fact that we’ve had perpetual memory leak issues with this thing since I started and have poured countless hours into fixing them and learning how to use it (and yet there’s still a memory leak!).

I’m starting to think it’s time to just throw the library away. A decision I should have made the first time I spent a week trying to integrate one. There just isn’t enough control over the thing, and it’s only getting worse now that it has become unsupported over the years we’ve been developing this game. I’ve been putting it off for as long as possible, thinking I might be able to make it work enough to avoid the expenditure. That said, I’m not going to just dump it all at once. It’s going to be a gradual approach of using my own system only when needed by the art. If we end up needing to replace every menu then so be it. If we can salvage the UI library for parts of the UI, then we will.

Of course all this is just going to delay getting the new interface up and running so. Great. Just great.