Wednesday, May 16, 2012

One Year Later

Seriously? It's been over a year since I updated this blog? Time flies when you're having fun I hear, but it also seems to fly when you're BUSY AS HECK.

Remember this?
It's gone. "WHY?!" you ask? Well there are several reasons including the MDI interface being unwieldy in real world use. Also using the XNA content pipeline project as the storage turned into an absolute nightmare. Winforms, in general, is falling out in favor of WPF. Needless to say, there are a great many reasons the editor died.

The good news however is that the project has been restarted from scratch using all the latest technology of Visual Studios 2010 (express edition anyways) using WPF and the MVVM pattern.  

BEHOLD!
Is that the Ribbon UI everyone's been hating in the new versions of office? Yes. Get off my back.
I am happy with how it's looking so far. The map editing functionality is pretty much all there. Multiple layers, multiple tilesets, fill, draw, erase, etc. I'm also using the built in DataContract annotation in the .NET framework to help with loading/saving map files. Originally a simple 100x100 map file was around 3mb thanks to XML and my verbose element names. I wrapped loading/saving with a CompressionStream and now the files are less then 100kb. I'd say that is an improvement.

Is that it? That's all I've accomplished in a year? Well yes and no. While I have lost a lot of time to rewriting the editor; I have gained a lot of knowledge on my travels in the world of C#. I am foregoing the concept of component driven design (as was all the rave in my last post) and gone back to a tried and true inheritance model. I know it isn't perfect, but I have too little time to spend on game development these days as I am now a father.

My little girl was born on December 7th, 2011, and I couldn't be happier.

I am hoping that by rekindling this blog, I can find the inspiration to complete my game. I first need tools so that's why I've spent so much time with the editor.

Until next time!

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