[Originally posted September 27th, 2010]
Despite the fact that it has been almost a week since my last dev journal, work has continued unabated. Last week I finished modifying the artwork to fit the new style, and created a new player sprite. I also filled in most of the missing player animations.
I finished up doors/triggers, and fixed up moving platform movement. I also fixed a bug with world map collision. There were a few little updates here and there, but on Friday I began working on getting VBOs (vertex buffer objects) implemented for the hardware renderer. In layman’s terms, I was hoping to greatly enhance rendering performance when using hardware rendering. After working on this for hours on Friday, as well as a little bit over the weekend, and hours more today, I finally got them working and optimized. Unfortunately, I found that VBOs actually caused a slight decrease in performance. I spent some more time playing around with them, but ultimately it looks like the rendering method I was using before will work better.
So, I spent the past hour or so reverting all of the necessary code. It should be mentioned that the VBO stuff was not a total loss, as I did come across a couple of nice optimizations I could do while working on it.
I just now rewrote the way the renderer accesses the dimensions of an image to be rendered, which cleaned up a lot of code nicely.
I’m calling it quits for now, although I will probably look at some other ways to optimize rendering tonight. Tomorrow, I will be resuming regular work.