What I\\\\\\'m Working On�

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I figure that rather than blabbering on the board all the time about what I\\\\\\'m working on, I\\\\\\'ll just keep an updated list here. I think this would be a good place maybe for everyone with a branch to keep update information that can be checked easily. I realize that some people aren\\\\\\'t as enthusiastic about this as I am, but I really like to know what others are doing with APE.�

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• Separating rendering from physics (and adding rendering features)
• Fixing timestep issues (interpolation)
• Spatial Partitioning (currently w/ spatial hashing, moving to multi-resolution grid)
• Researching Adobe AIR to plan level editor that can read/write files
• Optimizing!�

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Rendering Engine�

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My rendering engine is still in progress, got sidetracked by various physics research, playing with Adobe AIR, Bioshock, etc... It\\\\\\\\47s going to have a feature to autocache rotations of bitmaps, so you can just punch in how many rotation steps to cache (such as 4/8/16 or whatever) and set the rotation of the object just like you would a Bitmap (only faster). It only stores one copy of all of this, using copyPixels to render to the correct layer. Layers are done. Planning on physics preview mode, display mode, or overlay of both with transparency. A lot of the work is just coming up with how it should be organized, it\\\\\\\\47s not really that difficult to code.

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Spatial Partitioning�

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I have currently implemented basic spatial hashing, which does give a performance boost. It\\\\\\\\47s not a very big one though, so I need to add some features like multi-resolution grid, and only updating objects when they have moved.

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It\\\\\\\\47s very possible that an alternate method of broadphase/coarse collision detection would work better. I\\\\\\\\47m still waiting to see if Michael Baczynski over at Polygonal Labs� has better luck with a regular grid or quadtree... Apparently Motor Physics is going open source by the end of the year, so that should be interesting.

Another method to look into is "sort and sweep". There\\\\\\'s another name for it but I forget what it is... This has been very difficult to find information on, especially actual code.�MASON does use it though, but the code is set up quite a bit differently than APE. I understand the concept though, so I should be able to get it working when I get around to it.

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Level Editor�

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AIR is really cool! I played with it today (10/2/2007) and it\\\\\\'s actually very easy to use. You really don\\\\\\'t have to mess around with the MXML stuff much. Just a few tags for your programs title and a few other things to set it up. Everything else can be done with design editor in FlexBuilder 3, and the code is just like regular AS3. Running code based on UI cIicks and such is much like JavaScript on a web page (I wonder why...). You can import all your AS3 from APE, set it\\\\\\'s container to a Panel or something, and set up all kinds of UI controls to do stuff. I\\\\\\'m planning on drag & drop for creating objects since it looks pretty easy to do. Once I\\\\\\'m done with the first release of the rendering engine & maybe spatial partitioning, I\\\\\\'ll put out a small demo of APE in an AIR application, with a sample of writing objects to a file and then loading them.

Optimizing

Mostly this will come later, if someone else doesn\\\\\\\\47t get to it first, but if you haven\\\\\\\\47t tried out the sqrt optimization then you\\\\\\\\47re missing quite a speed boost. I\\\\\\\\47ll put the code in here later, but it\\\\\\\\47s already on the board if you search for it.

There are a lot of particles up there ^

(you can\\\\\\\\47t see a lot of them)