Switched Particle Systems

This is merely an effort to post here more often...

So I decided to switch my particle engine from the MS sample to using Mercury. So far so good. Had to rip out a ridiculous amount of code and basically completely change the way I was drawing everything, but in the end I think it'll be worth it.

Mercury's particle editor GUI is going to save me a lot of time editing effects without having to constantly edit and rebuild, look at the effect, and go back and revise it. The only complaint I have is that it's forced into using Immediate in SpriteBatch and that I have to deal with xml files for all the effects.

On the plus side, performance seems to be quite a bit better and it's a LOT better at allocating memory.

Soo...Hooray!?!

Some Recent Shots

Been spending most of time on the backend redoing a lot of code and streamlining things a bit, but here are some recent shots anyways.

Game Round 2

Decided I wasn't happy with where the other game was going and got burnt out after trying to develop it and an engine...soo...new game! Kept the name, will make more sense for the gameplay etc...anyways....screenshots!

Optimization...Round 1

So I started noticing a lot of framerate drops lately now that I've gotten a lot more stuff implemented so I decided to do some profiling and see where I was at. You know what I love(and hate) about optimization? The fact that the things that seem to be taking up the most time, are usually not the things you expect.

I have several things that I totally thought I'd have to revise, and it turns out most of the cpu time was spent just drawing my HUD! How can this be!?! Well with some digging and several "duh!" moments I've finally got a pretty solid 60 fps as the rest of my code was pretty optimized already apparently.

Hooray!

Bug fixes, ho!

Fixed a series of major bugs last night that seemingly went unnoticed for who knows how long. Took forever trying to track them down. I obviously need to schedule in regular play testing time of my own as more and more features are implemented.

Breaking things bad!

Particles!

Finished and implemented the particle system this weekend. Got a basic effect about finished for the logo in the menus and will start adding stuff for the gameplay. Should have a video of some stuff up pretty soon.

Some early shots

Everything is still very much in progress. I should have a video soon which should show off some of the gameplay a little better soon.