Citizen: Sitrep

Since last update I have worked on details mostly. Like adding an engine trail to the player ship, tweaking the explosions a little and adding batching of sprites before drawing them. I think the engine trail is necessary in order to get a better reference point of player ship motion. I felt the player ship movement combined with the camera movement could be a bit confusing without some indication of the path.

I ended up following the good advice by EasilyConfused to avoid using my previous singleton-ish Log class design. The measures I would have to take to keep it safe and stable would be too much compared to the small benefits. Now I use a design along the lines that he suggested, with a local Log object that opens, appends and closes the log file over its scope.

I have also started using precompiled headers with the project. After getting very little out of the MSDN documentation on the subject I found this amazing article written by Bruce Dawson that made it a breeze to get up and running. It contains a step by step instruction on how to set up the files and project in VC++ and also some additional background and useful info on PCHs. It took me less than a half hour to set things up and it cut my full rebuild time by more than 80%. I mean like wow! That was so much more that I had dared to hope for. [wow] Maybe it's a testament to my lousy code file design.

In other news my motherboard fried a couple of days ago so now I'm stuck with my older machine until a new one ships. Lucky enough, about a week ago I moved my project repository to a remote server - in case something should happen to my local machine. The timing could not have been better, really. All I had to do was to download and set up my dev environment on the elder machine, and I was up and running the project again after an hour. [wink]

Citizen.zip updated.