Unnamed Platformer - Devlog 14

I’m genuinely so done

What I did: I designed levels 5 and 7-16 (ss of a few levels should be attached idk which they are). I have a cool idea in mind for level 6 but my current code makes it hard to implement, and I also have a cool idea in mind for level 17 but my code made it hard to implement. So I changed everything up like an idiot.

My 17th level features a massive pool, but that requires me to draw 1000+ water tiles. Since I redraw tiles every frame, it causes a big load on the computer. So I had the brilliant idea of creating an sf::RenderTexture. spoiler it’s not so brilliant.

That led to a massive chain reaction where there were a bunch of nullptr issues at first, which I spent about 40 minutes on before actually getting the game to run. Then everything was super grainy due to aliasing issues caused by drawing everything to a RenderTexture, PLUS since I was drawing everything at the start of the frame and not updating it, stuff like buttons and doors would never update. SO, my dumb ahh moved half my static/environment tiles to dynamictilelist, reserved for strictly blocks which are the only tiles that can change position, and I did this cuz these would draw every frame and they didn’t have the same grainy look as the ones drawn to a texture. the result is probably self explanatory. That caused SO MANY ISSUES that I can’t even begin to describe them all, so after 50 minutes I undid 50 minutes worth of changes, added some spaghetti code to make it a bit more presentable, and call it a day.

Challenges: Level design was fun, and easy. I did that for all of yesterday and the first half-ish of today.

The vain attempt at making my code more efficient by changing how static tiles were drawn and then going on to deeply regret it and consider undoing it all the next day, was not. Also I probably shouldn’t have bothered trying seeing as I was pretty tired anyway, but ig my stupidity/ambition/idek led me to try. I’m genuinely too tired to bother elaborating, but it goes somewhat like this: I started on the texture-caching thing -> I ran into nullptr errors -> I got those out of the way -> I ran into issues with rendering and updating -> out of frustration I undid all my progress and started anew -> I decided to implement anti-aliasing -> I will probably(definitely) reset my code to where I had been right before I decided to do this stupid implementation

AI used, if any: none. If I had I would’ve probably been done with this bs by now.

Plans for next time: Realistically I’ll likely just undo all the changes I made to drawing processes, find out how to draw environment tiles underneath other entities/obstacles (which will be useful for many of my levels with spikes or the like in environments), and…thats it. Also, for level design, I want to have all preliminary designs down by the end of this Sunday (3 more days), and then I can playtest and refine later.

I wanna cry

P.S. the level with the white room is level 6 and it’s currently unfinished lmao