DevLog

[mctaylorpants]

December 6 Worked on traffic mainly, in the traffic branch. I want to get it to the point where the traffic turns right at every intersection reliably, then merge this back into the first_draft branch.

From there, we should use the tilemap objects to spawn the traffic, and set all the traffic to the same speed, then play around with optimal placement of traffic around the blocks.

[mctaylorpants]

Working on optimization now. Using the CoreAnimation profile, good way of getting a readout of FPS as well as timings.

• Figured out that the minimap was terribly inefficient, since all 1600 tile nodes are onscreen at once! Removed that and SpriteKit seems to be properly culling the fullsize map, only ~30 nodes rendered at any given time.
• There's still a lag when changing lanes or turning, so continue to look into authorizeTurnEvent and isTargetPointValid to see what gains can be made there.

[mctaylorpants]

Optimized authorizeMoveEvent significantly! There's no more lag when changing lanes. Continue to investigate how we might be able to get the draw count / memory usage down.

Next, focus on improving the performance of the traffic - we can pause nodes when they're offscreen so that they're not continually requesting turn events. Maybe calculate a padded area around the camera, and if a traffic node is within that then unpause it (maybe this calculation could be done on another thread)

After that, look into a better way of doing the minimap. I'm thinking take a pre-scaled still of the map, use that and then scale down the coordinates. Might be tricky but we can't have 1600 nodes for just the minimap!

[mctaylorpants]

Playtest session, Caitlin and Amo

• Touch controls would be better, the players were tapping a lot to make sure they hit a turn. swipe and hold might be better for turning.
• Different speeds - tap and hold to slow the ambulance down to the speed of the traffic (which should probably move faster anyway), and tap (or double-tap?) to stop
• Try portrait mode, since the lookahead is far more important than what's on the side
• Reduce the amount of traffic, it's quite hard to navigate at the moment
• Have a U-turn functionality or something to automatically switch direction?

[mctaylorpants]

Made some awesome progress on controls! Check out issue #26

[mctaylorpants]

Working on t-intersections.

Check out TODO on AMBPlayer.m line 318

            // TODO: implement a custom rotate/startmoving method so we can have complete control over the state (should remain PlayerIsLeavingTIntersection until it's out

[mctaylorpants]

Got the t-intersection and corner piece logic working! That should be it for the road logic, unless any more bugs crop up.

So now we have a fully working set of controls and logic for keeping the player where they should be. We've got traffic, and patients, and indicators, and a minimap.. the only BIG piece that's still kind of half-baked is the fuel. Work on that, and start balancing it.

[mctaylorpants]

Just hooked up a bunch of temp scenes for game menus. Got a restart button working in-game; need to expand this to an in-game menu with the ability to restart and return to main menu.

The game menus pass into the scene all three variables we need to set up the game: game type, vehicle type and level type. Need to clean up the scene init and implement these (which will probably mean finally implementing some shared asset loading code too)

[mctaylorpants]

• Working on menus, mocking up the 'Help' menu in Inkscape (credits_mockup_v001)
• This should include instructions + short credits
• After this, mock up the settings menu.