I kind of got side-tracked since my last update for Lacadia. After I started fooling around with particles, I wanted to create a separate project for fooling around with particle systems and see how efficient I could make it. It's been really interesting and I'm going to start another blog about that... (I'm not exactly sure if you're supposed to have more than one blog but I guess I'll figure it out!) But I just got back to making some changes for Lacadia...
One of the biggest things I changed was the way the code was organized. Previously I had all my data for the current level, items, characters, enemies, etc. just sitting in my main Game class. Well I decided that wasn't very clear, and it was pretty ugly too, so I made a GameLevel class, and basically moved all the character, enemies, items, rooms, hallways, and other things into that, and in my main game class, I just call GameLevel.Update and GameLevel.Draw. I think it makes it a little more understandable. Another thing it allows me to do is have a reference to the current GameLevel without having access to the Game itself. So following that change I created a GameObject interface. A GameObject is anything that is going to be on the screen. So characters, items, chests, enemies are all GameObjects. A GameObject has a position, whether its removed or not (for instance if an enemy dies it sets this to true), a reference to the GameLevel it is on, and some other things. This allowed me to make A LOT of my code waaaaay more readable, and clearer as well. Now I'm not sure if this is a good thing to do, I don't really understand the whole use of private and public variables, but I'm guessing having your character be able to access all the enemies and item lists is probably a bad thing... I'll have to investigate some time.
Another thing I did was update some class mechanics. I'll put a video of these with this post, but basically I changed the whole Warrior attacking mechanic. Previously the warriors sword would follow the mouse, so you could "swing" it by moving your mouse in a direction. All I did was put collision detection on the sword and that was that. This caused problems and wasn't very fun though. You could just hold your sword still and enemies that were on top of it would die, which wasn't very fun. Also swinging it around with your mouse was kind of hard. So I got rid of it. I changed it so when you click, you swing your sword around you in a circle, and it damages all enemies it touches. It's still not quite satisfying when you attack with the sword because you can't really control which direction it goes in, but I think I have an idea to fix that.
The last thing I want to talk about is render targets. So along with fooling around with particle systems, I started investigating my memory usage and frame rate. I discovered that drawing the stats of your character and stuff on the screen was escalating my memory usage a lot and it was because I was creating these strings and then throwing them away, multiple times per second. So I wanted to find a way to only draw stats if they were updated. In come render targets. Render targets are basically like another drawing layer. You can draw on them, an then draw them on top of the main graphics. So I draw all the UI on this other render target, and then if it needs to be updated, I update the render target. It helped memory usage a lot, although I still should change those strings to string builders.
So that's it for today's blog post! Hope you enjoyed!
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