My preferred working hours these days is at night, since my two boys tend to have a bit of an unpredictable nature to their sleeping habits and their effects on our sleeping schedule can make for a bad early morning awareness. Feeling productive again, and feeling good about that since I have not really been at that point for at least 2 months now.
So, I am creating some basic shapes that the app loads at startup so that not everything needs to be built on demand.
During this little exercise, I of course needed to rewrite a few things, add some internal commands and change the way I send commands to my builder. But it is all good, since I can now store resources as text file commands that will load dependencies and such on demand and compile them into flatbuffers to be thrown at my geometry processing.
For the most part, I can store all the assets I create with this as text files in git and all the generated stuff shoved into temp directories, as external libraries or built for a game project.
Now, I need to test my work for the last couple of weeks and see if my changes are working as expected and that I can get at the data I need as I need it from my builder, be it in the same process, alternate process or on another machine entirely.
For my immediate needs, it just needs to come from the same process, from another thread. Spit out the polygons as it did previously, but through my overly simplified and portable API that I can reused and jab into any other game project without much hassle.
It was quite a lot of work to make all of this as generic as it is. Pain in the ass actually, since I find it a lot more work and more difficult to create pretty and simple APIs than solving convoluted geometric algorithms.
Pushing the basic shapes I created tonight as part of command batches I will send to the builder tomorrow to fuse into some pre-installed items to have access to without any machinery.
After that, I am fixing up the previous use of the API so that all the old features start to work again.
Blah, best be off to bed. I have a sick 1 year old boy that is without a doubt going to wake us up a few times during the coming night.
Ta ta
V 