r3.4 Progress Report #2 - Dec 8 @ 09:30 UTC (Task List)
Going to try something different with the status posts this time around. Rather than just updating in the task list, I'm going to put out new posts and link back to task list. This will let the notification do a better job of helping people who want to follow along (I hope). Anyhow, if it sucks can always go back to the old way it was.
Brain is a little fired, so I might be even less coherent, and even more rambley than usual (have been at this for like 15~16hrs, can't do math...). I wanted to keep going but I'm making more mistakes than progress, so probably time to stop for the night.
Overall, slower progress than I wanted for the first day, I was really hoping to knock out the first scene but not even half way done. It feels like I hardly made a dent in it, started with roughly 540ish images for this scene, and I have 373 left to put in... I think? I keep finding more... But also, I did like 1500lines of code today, I dono, brain mush...
I needed a bit more lead in that I had anticipated (to bridge into the new scene), so I wasted a bunch of time writing, realized it was getting out of hand, and cut it way the fuck back. It's still probably too long, but that is a problem for future me to deal with.
Next big spot of trouble is that I've (for whatever dumb reason) changed the way I'm doing images this time around, and getting the flow just right was a mess. I finally got it down to a smooth process in the later half of the day, but I lost of a lot of time fucking around with it (and WAY over engineering it). I won't get super long winded with it (too late) but I'm doing something majorly different this time around with images.
The game is getting big, way bigger than I want it to be. I've switched compression tools, but that only takes me so far. So I'm onto the second step (arguably should have been the first step, but lazy... and it's a lot of extra work) in space savings, slicing. Having a base layer, then only including the parts of the image that change. Space savings is pretty damn good too, as an example before slicing, 31 images were 12MB, after slicing, 2MB, before compression. This scene has 540 images or roughly 350MB of content, after slicing, I expect that to be closer to 20-30MB, after compression I expect it to be more like 5-10MB.
At some point, I want to do the whole game, but... uh, maybe during the next big wait, haven't decide yet...
As an added bonus (literally) part of the new structure allows me to add in blinking into pretty much every image that has a face on it. So... I hope you like characters blinking... If not... too bad.
Anyhow... I've read over this like four times and drifted off at least once... back at it tomorrow, will push hard to finish up this scene, it's the biggest one of the update (in terms of size).
