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posts dated from: may 2016

Otter Updates

Otter Updates
A lot of Otter updates have gone through the pipe over the past few weeks and I should mention what they are!

* RichText bugs related to calculating the longest line of text have been fixed. Basically for one frame the RichText would miscalculate the length of its lines resulting in a slight offset for that frame.

* Fixed a bug with CollideEntities where the same entity could be registered to the list more than once.

* Entities now have a Position property vector.

* Added Scene.GetEntitiesAll()

* Added the ability to load in assets with a packed byte array. (See the Files class for more details.)

* Animating characters after text is written with RichText is now handled in a way that wont reset all the animations when appending to the string. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it.

* Added Coroutine.WaitForTween() to make it simpler to pause a coroutine until a tween has finished.

* Debugger.Summon() is now public and can be called from code. This isn't tested very thoroughly and could result in some undesired behavior in rare cases.

* Added Component.GetEntity<T>() to make it easier to get the correct Entity type. (Basically just hiding the casting in that method instead of having to cast Component.Entity)

* Input has static methods for getting joystick information (GetJoystickName, VendorId, and ProductId)

* Slight optimization in some collision methods (not very noticeable probably.)

* Added Graphic.TextureChanged() virtual method. Called when a graphic's texture has been changed.

* Added a Countdown Component for simple timers that just count down to zero from a specific time.

* Scene and Entity have indexers now for integers. Entities and Components are given unique integer ids when they are added to Scenes and Entities respectively. Not sure if this is useful, but adding it seemed like a good idea.

Okay I think that covers most of it.

Also for other types of Otter updates you should follow this instragram.

Doodle Post

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Otter on Nuget

Otter on Nuget
Thanks to the help of some friendly internet folks I finally got a process to get Otter up and running on Nuget! You can check out the latest main build of Otter all wrapped up as a Nuget package right here.

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I know that it was in demand for awhile now but for the longest time I just couldn't figure out the process needed to get Otter up there. Now you can enjoy all the luxuries of the Otter game making framework without having to go download files and move them around and all that junk. Just install the package from Nuget and you're good to go!

Also somehow the name Otter wasn't taken already?

Doodle Post

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In another one of those phases where I feel like I've completely forgotten how to draw anything.

To Shader Hell and Back

To Shader Hell and Back
As I'm starting to send out builds of Super Sky Sisters for people to test I'm slowly churning through bugs and crashes that I was completely unaware of until the game runs on different hardware. One of those crashes is caused by creating way too many shaders so I've been investigating on how to address that for now.

One big idea I had was to change how Otter uses shaders internally, but I think after some experiments this idea probably isn't going to work. The idea was to have Otter's Shader class keep a cache of compiled shaders instead of creating and compiling a new shader every time. Basically when making a shader it would check to see if an exact copy of that shader has already been created and compiled, and if so it would just use that one.

However that means that every sprite using the same shader would then also be sharing that shader's parameters. So if I wanted to change the color on an enemy, it would change the color on everything else as well. In order to get around that Otter's shader class would then have to manage and apply the shader's parameters before each render. So EntityA could set its parameters before rendering, and then EntityB could do the same.

I went down the rabbit hole a little bit with this technique but quickly found it performs like crap mostly. Iterating through every parameter per shader per entity per render becomes pretty chuggy pretty quickly. At first I thought this would be a pretty good idea since it would reduce hundreds of shaders to just 1, but the process of applying parameters before each render seems to be not the fastest thing in the world.

So now I'm back to the regular old way that Otter does shaders which is creates and compiles one for every shader instance. This has some downsides but I'm pretty sure it still ends up being faster than my experiment with a compiled shader cache.

I have some work ahead of me still to stop some of the crashes for Super Sky Sisters, but I'm pretty sure I know how to fix it it's just figuring out the right arrangement of code to implement the fix!

Doodle Post

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