Continuing to work on the "Consequences" mission. This mission is stressing some of the final code paths (like AI operated drone ships). I also spent some time improving the renderer. Currently I'm doing to work to make the data editor more usable (help text, corpus link fields auto-completing, and showing multiple data objects at once - for comparison). Consequences should be done shortly which may one of the two or three most complicated missions in the game. So it's a great stress test.

I'm adding a lot of model content because you are going into a Clan base for the first time in the current level. So I have to make a way of high-lighting model parts and correctly deleting and moving parts and their sub-parts. High-lighting actually ended up being a lot harder then I thought it would be. Because I bake my models into one render call (which makes them much faster to render), I really don't have a good way of displaying them. So what I did was add an object that could be passed into the baking process that could alter the baking process. Then I made an object that changes the color if it is the selected part. Then I modified the rendered object so it could select which baked object to use. Then in the editor I just toggle between the two baked models and the high-light flashes back and forth.

Finished the optimization work and started on the next portion of Consequences. This is the first time you encounter enemy drones and man were they busted. But I managed to get that all fixed, so now you can use you drones to stop a set of enemy drones while another set of drones attack them. It's all good.

The next steps was to do some more model creation, which has gotten me to a tipping point where I need to modify model editor so I can see which part I'm actually working on. This is actually substantially harder then you would think. Since I always bake my models into one single draw call, I need to make two models. One normal, and the other with a hi-lighted set of faces for the part that is currently selected and then switch between the two. This will show us which part is currently selected.

Played my most complicated level to date, Remember, on the xbox today. Man is it slow! The main difference comes from the addition of all of the environment objects. What I would give for pix!

Built my own in game profiler and started tracking it down. Eventually I found out that every frame my 40 odd ships were evaluating every asteroid to see if they were a viable target! A little list maintenance and that problem is solved.

It's still crazy how different that piece of non-optimal code effects the pc vs xbox versions. Pc=0.6 ms, xbox=20ms!

Profile markup is still a pain. I'm going to try figure out an easier way to do it.

Finishing up one of the bigger missions in the game. Add escape pods to the ships and did some major work on the animation systems. Now just need to add some environment extras to fill out the level.

DBP is over and now I'm starting to work on some of the risky improvements that are needed. I had a good spatial representation system but I was not doing ship v ship collisions. Got it working today but it definitely broke some things. But I think I've got them all fixed now. I'm thinking I'm going to release it play test to get se feedback. I was pretty disapointed that no one called it out in the post DBP thread.

My DBP 2010 video entry.