Sunday, March 02, 2008

XInput Finished

I finished up the XInput implementation for the Engine this weekend. I still have to finish the DirectInput functionality though. XInput was fairly easy to implement once I found some time to write the proper wrappers for it. It was so easy I wish it were the only thing that I needed to support, but that just wouldn't be smart.

Anyways, with as little time as I have hopefully I can get the DirectInput finished by the end of this week. It's my son and my nephews birthdays this week though as well as week three and the final week of training at my job, so I'll probably be really busy. I'll still find time to code though.

I also have decided that I need to write a more flexible version of the bitmap font class that is currently in the engine, because well, it kind of sucks the life out of updates. I've never really noticed it before because I have never had a lot of text on the screen at one time, but with the demo that I'm writing to test the input you can definitely see the difference.

Here's a screen shot trying the built in picture layout functionality of blogger. ( I usually don't like these because they are not as flexible or as easy to use as simple html tags.)




The frame rate is very low when a device is connected and there is a bunch of text
on the screen, but when a device isn't connected the frame rate is in the seven hundreds. That's a flag if I ever saw one. I still have a lot to do and I'm not really sure if the proto-type release will be done by Mid March, in fact at this point I'm pretty sure I'm going to go over as I'm planning on being a perfectionist because I really want the proto-type to be pretty polished. And if not the game, at least have a very polished version of the engine.