8-14-07 - 3142 Rows

Yep, a second update on the same day. Sorta. You see the last update was at around 1 AM, so technically it was 8-14. Now it later, but still the same date. Anyway, had some breakthroughs. I screwed around and worked out a quick mock up of what the Level Editor will look like and it looks good. Easy (ish) to code and seems easy to use as I play around with the GUI in PSP. I think I’ll call the editor “ThiefEd” (pronounced Th-ee-f-d as opposed to theived).

Another breakthrough was in the image format. As I whined before about Lossy Jpeg crap and giant BMP files I considered converting the code to using GIF images. The problem with that is that Blitz only displays them as movies, so I would have to rewrite the display code, and screw that. Instead I found another alternative – PNG images. They are compressed like GIF – I think they have 256 colors, but Blitz can display them as normal pictures. That means I won’t have to convert my display code, which is good news.

Also, the Row count was wrong yesterday, 756 was the row I was working on. The one now is correct.

Today the plan is to install the Death Rectangle collision loop. Not correct and debug it mind you, I’m running 2 hours sleep. But at least get it working.

- Gods Dammit. It’s installed but I can’t duck under it. The Death Rect is supposed to work if – and only if- the sprite is overlapping it. Hence, if it’s eye height it should hurt you when you stand and leave you alone when you duck. But it doesn’t and I’m too tired to fix it.

- Shite. When you run the code it automatically saves it, so I overwrote yesterdays archive. Now I know better and I should only do it another dozen times before I stop.

Random Thought: I don’t write fancy code. I don’t use complex tricks and almost everything uses the most basic of commands (if is there at least 400 times and I had to look up if else). I’m not sure if that means my code runs fast or anything – since it runs fast on my system and I don’t play it elsewhere. I do know that my code is very easy to debug. Everything is modular and easily broken into pieces and I write lengthy comments on everything. Just a note for actual programmers out there to remember – Bulletproof code beats the hell out of Shiny code.