Saturday 26 January 2008

Many, many bugs fixed

The original fade-in method turned out to be very buggy; firstly, when fading levels in the character appeared on top of the fading level. Also, the fade was incredibly jerky at times, as the algorithm was particularly inaccurate. And on top of this, the scene was completely frozen whilst fading was taking place, which to be honest looked rubbish - for example, this meant that if you moved the mouse whilst the title screen was fading in, the text would remain still and then jump to the right place once the fade was finished.

So I completely re-coded the fade-in method so that instead of capturing the screen, altering the alpha value and then blitting it each time, it now uses the parent object's update method so that the scene you're fading into runs normally. Meanwhile, it blits in a plain black square with an alpha value on top of the scene, so that it's really just a black square that fades out with the scene behind it. This is now working perfectly, with no glitches at all so far!

As well as bugfixing, I've also been redesigning the filesystem some more. At the beginning of development, it was decided that music would be put in the level folders so it could be easily loaded with the level by supplying only the folder name. But this means that there needs to be a music file inside every single level folder, and with the average file being around 2 megabytes, 25 levels will take up a massive amount of space. So instead of that, I'm now storing all music in the engine's Data folder, and and the level controller has been modified so it takes the path to the music as an argument. I'm going to have a total of ten tunes, one for each main area in the game, so the final game's file size will be a lot smaller this way.

Now I'm moving on to designing and coding the level intro sequence module. Screenshots to come!

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