I've made a small amount of progress this weekend. I'm still deep into my re-factoring goals but I'm close to putting my ideas to the test. I've redone the Screen Manager to use a form of "Double Buffering" system. Previously, I held a reference to every possible screen all at once. Something around 10 fully loaded screens with initialized objects. I'm in the middle of testing holding no more than two screens at any moment. I have a single front buffer that displays the current screen and a back buffer that loads the next in coming screen as soon as it needs to. Once the back buffer is finished loading, it will fire off a command to swap buffers bringing it to the front while bringing the other to the back and safely unload it. This will take some testing to demonstrate the performance benefits but this may be best as each screen can now independently manage itself without the need for an all encompassing puppet master. This double buffer system has also given me ideas for possible transitions between screen which are commonly seen in Visual Novels.
The other system I'm working on that I'm pleased with is my new Dialog Window system. Before I treated Dialog Boxes as one off events with hard coded custom logic for which ever screens required it. Now I've developed a suite of common dialog boxes that all screens can readily spawn and customize. These include things such as Alerts, Confirmations, Input Boxes, as well as the main Dialog box. The real awesome part is that they can perform their job independently from a single function call and output the result to a single object. This is a vast improvement from the button nightmare I had before.
On the non-code front, I've been looking at bunches of different free erotic games for further inspiration for CGF. I ended up playing tons of RAGs games found on TFGames. While quite a few of those games are well made, and share some pretty interesting ideas; None seem to attempt to achieve what I'm trying right here in terms of scope and theme. Even so I might be pull some narrative ideas out and finally give an actual environment to CGF.
I'll make sure to keep you guys posted.
What do you mean by environment? Do you mean just a setting for the game to take place in?
ReplyDeleteYes, I do mean the setting. A place that gives any sort of narrative a definite context to which the worlds norms and standards can come about. I'm particularly impressed with Fenoxo's Mareth: A border plane in which demons and strange beings call home and Daisy Strike's Other World (Forgot the city's name): A dimensional crossroad with an meshing of foreign cultures and interesting institutions. I'd like to have something that just makes sense for the existence of cow girls and their roles.
DeleteI hear ya, think I've played anything there that's even remotely good.
ReplyDeleteAs far as setting if you find an idea you like you can expand your game later to build on it. Being able to buy something other then cowgirls for example.
I never questioned the existence of the cowgirls, and always just figured it for our own world. I don't know if the dimensional crossroads angle is necessary though, but adding more to the world with a setting like that would be cool.
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