Sunday 15 November 2015

String class

After 15 days of Brick Atelier development (although not much happened there) I returned to Kaduria by creating a string class. Everyone familiar with C++ knows that you should not write your own string class. Well... it is not exactly that kind of string class. I just needed a class that takes in const text data and then you can do stuff like uppercase the first letter.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes you need to change something in the text data and for that the data has to be copied and then changed. Sometimes std::string is ok, but it's kind of weird to handle individual chars. For example if you want to uppercase the first letter, you have to remove the first letter and then add uppercased version to front of the string.

I'm of course not planning to replace std::string with K_String class and surely the places where I need K_String are few and limited.

The overall development should change the focus from engine/source code twiddling to making actual stuff happen. This is an old and broad subject - the "engine coding" vs. content creation approach where you first decide to implement some feature and then just make it happen. I think Kaduria has enough building blocks for content creation in a way that really doesn't require any major rewrites in the future. I hope the message system was the last big rewrite.

Monday 2 November 2015

Focus on Brick Atelier

I'm switching the main project to Brick Atelier for at least this first week or two of this month. I've noticed that it's better to focus on one project at a time. And Brick Atelier is quite important, because I can't imagine using any other drawing tool for tiles. It's actually quite surprising how few pixel art programs there are.