I'm off on holiday this week though (no reason, just use it or lose it really) so finally got round to launching VS again today.
It's quite nice to have a few weeks break from a project. Squishy pleasantly surprised me by being more fun to play than I remembered, which is always good for motivation.
Not much done really - I've added in a system where I can pass a config string as a command line argument to the program, currently only supporting being able to specify a level to jump straight to without the splash screen. The idea is to be able to test a level at the touch of a button from the level editor.
I've come to the conclusion that in-game editors are the way forward but it is far too late on this project to build that in now, so I figure at the very least I should be able to hit a key in Squed to jump straight into the level in Squishy without actually saving the level changes to the Squed file. To be honest, most of the delay from editor to game is by device switching so unless I wrote the editor in game with a D3D GUI, I'm not going to improve much on this system.
I've also added a feature for development mode whereby holding down SHIFT makes the game run at 8x normal speed. This is handy for skipping through long-winded sections like the intro level's dialog boxes I YouTubed about recently and also quite fun to play with.
It was quite trivial to implement on top of the Gaffer style main loop - I just call the Update() function multiple times per each timestep chunk sliced from the accumulator but still pass the full timestep as the delta, so the game stays completely stable (well, as stable as at normal speed anyway) and rendering is largely unaffected.
Sitting here wondering if you could have a physics sim take a negative delta to integrate backwards? I'm guessing Braid doesn't work that way since inaccuracies would rob the determinism I suppose.
In other media, Please, Mr Einstein is proving to be a fascinating book so far and I thought District 9 was a great film. I've always loved pseudo-documentary-style sci-fi.
