I’ve been sidelined for the past few days with some really severe back pain. I was going to get back on the computer over the weekend, but on Saturday it was still too painful to sit upright for more than a few minutes. Today, my back still hurts but the pain is much more bearable. So I’m back on the keyboard.
There’s nothing new to report on Smoothie. Right now, I’m well behind schedule on the other project. So all of my time over today and, most likely, tomorrow will be spent focused on that. I need to get the prototype done and in the hands of the other team members for their feedback. We are all eager to announce the project, but aren’t going to do it until we get the details finalized.
Back pain aside, this has turned out to be a particularly challenging project for me. Algorithmically, it’s not such a big deal as I have enough low-level graphics experience, coupled with several references, to see me through. The challenge has been the high-level interface. Trying to come up with an easy-to-use interface that is flexible enough to allow alternate implementations to be easily implemented and plugged in has not been as easy as I had thought it would be. The challenge has been coming up with such an interface under certain constraints. For example, users of similar libraries should be able to come to this one and feel right at home without needing to learn a new paradigm. Another thing is I want to keep internal memory allocations to a minimum. I was pretty naive in the beginning, thinking I could knock all of this out in a couple of weeks. Yeah, well, not so much.
Anyway, after several iterations I think I’ve got the finish line in sight. The remainder of the implementation shouldn’t be too painful, so I can hopefully have the initial prototype wrapped up by tomorrow. Then if all goes well, an announcement can be made shortly after. It’s not strictly a game-related project, but it’s close enough for me to blog about it here.
Technorati Tags: devlog, Smoothie, programming, interfaces
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