Hello! Haven’t updated for awhile, starting to get over some the anxiety which has stopped me from updating things in the last month. Good news is I graduated yay!, but my degree still hasn’t arrived in the mail (couldn’t afford to go to graduation). Now thats over I want to talk about some technical design flaws I have picked out of Dodge and Destroy which I am going to address, as well as an update on my XNA game, and other things.

First I want to talk about Dodge and Destroy and some big flaws I have picked out in the design. Some objects such as the player object just do too much. The player object encapsulates and manages projectiles which it should definitely not; just makes no sense. There are also some unnecessary data held by all the game objects that I have found that I am going to take out. Currently objects such as the Player object, and SpawnController object contain and manage the sprites for drawing the player and enemy, and it should definitely not work this way. All of these issues cause memory fragmentation, and cache locality issues when updating the game.

What I am planning on doing is containing graphics components(sprites) into its own vector or array outside of the classes they are currently contained in. Along with this removing unnecessary data, and by doing this it should improve performance. It is these little flaws in the program that have bothered me for awhile and I am just going to fix them this week. I have decided against using a quad-tree like structure for collision calculations in this game, while it may reduce the number of calculations I think for this title it the overhead may not be worth it; however I am going to do a little work to confirm if this is the case.

Now the update on my XNA game. I have created the component//entity system to handle objects in the game, and thats about it for work I have completed on it :(. I have also been going over the level generation code, and I think I can cut out a significant amount of vertices, which should dramatically improve rendering performance of the environment. Right now its not terrible, but not where I would like it to be. I would also like to smooth out the edges along the cliffs to make it less “boxy”. I just have to go through the algorithm that generates the model and modify it. My progress on this title isn’t going as quick as I’d like, but things have been pretty hetic lately :(.

Anyway that’s about it for updates right now. I never expected a job search to last this long, but I understand it is a very competitive environment, especially in these times. Still confident something will come up though, been trying to find other non-programming jobs also in the mean time but ironically that’s not working out well either :/.