Hey folks!
It's been a bit slow lately. That horrible thing called Real Life have been creeping upon us.
But there have been some progress anyway.
Afe have reworked parts of the saving system and fixed various things.
I changed some of the tiles, separating the decorative elements and the actual colliding stuff.
Then I went on to redo the test level (since it broke when saving system changed).
Reloading the level without restartinghave not worked before (basic, i know) but I finally got around to fixing it.
I added quite a lot of decorative elements to make things look more lively. Since our editor is the actual game I can test the level while editing. I noticed the game getting laggier and laggier as I added more things.
Crap, I thought, and figured it was because of the larger amount of decorative items. We do have all items present in the physics "world", even the non-colliding decorative items, so I thought that was the problem.
Through a lot of trouble I managed to separate them. One of the problems was that we set the item-positions from their physics body. Since I had removed the physics body from the decoration items I had to make an ugly hack to make that work. This also affected the editor part, selecting and moving stopped working. More ugly hacks, but finally it worked.
Through the hell, I dreamed about my lovely refactored project, where none of these problems would have occured.
I was coding on my laptop in bed at the time, very ergonomical, and hot... in an entirely non-sexual way.
While fixing this did provide a slight performance increase,
not blocking the airflow to the computer proved to have much bigger impact on performance... *sigh*
The moral of the story? When in bed, don't do things prematurely, especially optimizations.
On a more serious note, I'm starting to notice that it's quite hard to construct puzzles that are both intuitive and hard with the mechanics we have now. A lot of work goes in to blocking "unwanted" solutions and trying to lead the player towards your intended solution.
I have only made a few puzzles so far, maybe it will get easier with practice? :)
I use decorative items to hide the low-res nature of the ground "mesh".
