Status Update (Pacific Rim is still awesome!!)

Forgive me, I still cant get over the fact of how awesome PacificRim really is. Some one needs to make a game about conducting the Jaeger program against kaiju, XCom style! Feel free to steal my idea.  :)

Mean while, back in my life, it's work, work... never ending work and never ending of ideas to try. The good news is, the research project which I worked part time for has now ended. Of course that doesn't mean that I can spend more time playing games now, it just means  that I can now concentrate full time on my own work. Got to say that feels... liberating. 

Anyway, I've been working hard through the weekend on TBTK. The plan is to try to fixed all the bugs reported to me (or encounter by myself) so far, add more polish to the code (by which I mean comment and clean up) then update the package by the end of coming week. If possible, I would very much like to squeeze in mobile support to TBTK before the release of next update. 

It goes without saying, of all these things I'm trying to do, the trickiest one being mobile support. There's plenty to consider of course. First the optimisation, by my standard, at the minimum, it needs to run for at least 20fps for all the demo scenes. When I first try it, it register something like 15fps or lower for even the smallest and simplest of the demo scene. After some tinkering which took almost all of my weekend, now at least even the space theme scene, the one that contains most lot of rendered object can easily push pass 20, sometime reaching 30. So it's not bad.

Then there's the Input scheme. Obviously on touch device you cant just hover over a tile with the cursor or right click, and there's no shortcut key as well for that matter. So an entirely different input scheme has to be used. The alternative input would involve a lot of second tap to confirm a selection. That is now half done, but there's still plenty of testing to do.

I have also tried my hand at cover system and fog of war. It's just too interesting to think about the possibility but not doing something about it. It's rather complicated compared to other mechanic of the toolkit, more so than I first anticipated. So they definitely wont make it into the next update. In fact, I'm not going to promise anything. Just hopefully it's going to make it to the toolkit at some point.

Apart from TBTK, I also have plans to do some update to TDTK. It's time to break out TDTK's 'to-do-list' and get something to do.

Now back to work...