That’s what I felt like after finishing Slayers NEXT (recommended by the great Arai). A nice ol’ fantasy adventure with a nice, in-depth world to support it. Slowly but surely, I’m gearing up for Slayers Revolution (which I hope will be good and not suffer from any “resurrection sickness”).

In the last post, I mentioned being concerned about lag between frame and location, so I went and ran some ad hoc tests. Turns out that, at least on the computer I’m using, the difference in lag is less than millisecond. ^^; I guess I was worrying too much… In any case, Codename Spark reached v0.0.6.3, and about all I really want to do with it for now. Guess it’s time to move onto another section… probably image layers? Since I’ve done so much graphical coding so far (which is definitely not my forte), I guess it’s good to continue with it until I get sick of pixels and SDL_Surfaces and whatnot. That way, doing something far more interesting, like reimplementing the ZODIAC system I had before, will be far, far more engaging.

Lately, I’ve been getting more ideas for Eldeen’s world, to the point that I might just end up writing some of this stuff down. Maybe afterwards, it’ll make more sense. Hopefully, after all of Nekohime is said and done, I can use the engine to recreate my new world. At the very least, it’ll serve as a nice way to demonstrate other things you can do with it.

RK should stop staying up so late. He should also stop doing stupid mistakes that would take over an hour of debugging to figure out, only to change a two 0’s into two i’s. God save us all.

Spark v0.0.6.3

NoodleKnight pushed me to write another blog entry, so here I am, I guess.

As the title indicates, I’m not quite dead yet, and, surprisingly neither is Nekohime. It’s just in continual development hell. ^^; I just do some personal programming for it every now and then.

For the most part, the coding hasn’t been much of a challenge in actual programming, though design is a bit different. Mainly, balancing simple code that might have inherent shortcomings versus complex code that is hard to work out. My current problem involves synchronization of sprite frames and movement based on time. While what I have pretty much works out fine, the fact that I know that it’s technically not completely synchronized grates on my conscious. I originally avoided some of the complications with a startAt() method, so I’m possibly looking at getFrameAt() and getLocationAt() to solve the problem. Of course, the trade-off for synchronization is the lag due to the processing; instead of one being off 10 units of time with the off by 5, they’ll both be off by 10 units of time. … Not quite an improvement I’d hope for…

I’ll probably just do what I’ve been doing for now (5/10 lag instead of 10/10 lag), as the design is modular enough that I can improve that bit of code or even tweak the interface or implementation fairly painlessly.

Lately, I’ve been getting some new ideas in my head, too. First being the adventures of Eldeen, and the second being related to me currently watching Slayers NEXT. (The Slayers series, by the way, is something I really should have watched a long time ago.)

Too bad they’re both still a bit too fuzzy to work out. Maybe with some more time.

RK wishes kiryuu=rekka and arai would come back sometime soon, as it’s kinda’ painful to get into a lot of stuff they recommend only for them to not show up again…

Spark: v0.0.5.1