Bangging Two Rocks

It has been fairly productive over here at the project. With the Holiday free to program, and a fairly quiet day today, a good deal was accomplished. Monday started with a good deal of rework on the Entity classes as well as adding a hash_map to keep track of the various resources that will get loaded. Most of that was done to put off the inevitable dread of dealing with Collision Detection and Management.

The dread was trying to be too cleaver again. At first I was trying to abuse polymorphism and type casting to figure out if I am comparing circles or squares. Though in the end I decided to make it fairly explicit. Each Entity contains a vector of rectangles and circles that can be used to define its collision geometry. Then I compare all the rectangles of the first entity with the rectangles and circles of the other then all the circles. It works well enough and seems to run fast enough. With two mobile objects and a background tile board, I can hold between 70 and 100 FPS depending on which system I am testing on.

I think in my haste I have jumped between different naming schemes for variables. While quickly writing up new functions, I started using shorter and shorter parameter names. Attributes in classes are still fairly verbose, but I took a few abbreviation with parameters.

Then next task is Data File management. Every entity and resource has a Load call, but for now it is just static configurations. Now it is time to figure out a data file format as well as creating a parser to read those files to configure the entities and resources. I think for now I will go with a simple Key-Value system. I used these all the time in Perl, but it had built in regex support as well as much more flexible Hash data structures. Still I would rather a human readable file then some tightly woven string of numbers.

After I get this up and running, I may take a look at building an XML parser. Sure there may be some good ones pre-made, but I could use the time to get familiar with XML by itself.

I also may take a side trip to learn Python and start doing integration there as well. Sure the gaming folks may tend to favor Lua, but Python has some other uses as well for me. Besides it is the integration of scripting languages in to my code that is the trick. The actual scripting language isn't that big of a deal. I have learned many programing and scripting languages already, that it is matter of new syntax.

This should keep my busy for a while. My goal is to get enough foundation in place that putting together a Pac-Man game is just adding some sprites and glue.