Into alpha land

Well, that was an experience!

I released the Alpha version of TileMax containing the ParticleFX system, Timing, Anim, and Graphics systems. But little did I know that I had two deep seeded bugs that were going to haunt me.  Shortly after releasing the particle system, particles would just start randomly disappearing... sometimes they looked grouped.  But I began pulling my hair out trying to find it.   Finally... I discovered that I was running old array packing code (forgot to comment it) and my new one... so I got the disappearing particles problem ironed out!

Of course, shortly after that one of my alpha testers (samah) created a sequenced animation of a bubble that would cause a null reference error.  Again.. the bug was not obvious.  in fact, the bug did not surface until a specific combination of sequencer nodes is created.  But, looking back... i'm not sure how it worked at all!  So those are ironed out!

So, initial steps into the alpha were interesting.  I was wise to step into it with the Particle System and not the whole system... because now that certain aspects of the particle system are ironed out and proven.. I can go through each of the next sections a little slower and prepare for the next alpha release featuring...whatever makes the most sense.

I can see the light

I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel... there is still quite a bit to do but I am now calling for alpha testers.

Details can be seen http://www.blitzmonkeys.com/index.php?topic=310.0;topicseen

This site is hosting a private forum for alpha>beta testing.  If interested, contact me via email or comment.

Somethings don't always go as planned

So I got the Particle System working and it was fairly nice but I was not happy with the performance nor with the flexibility... So, I rewrote it from scratch!!

Thankfully the new version is an order of magnitude faster and much more flexible.  I'm maintaining over 60fps with over 1100 particles flying around, phasing out, spinning etc on my laptop!  A tester was able to get 60fps with over 3800 particles flying around on his AMD64 2400+GeForce.  Those are some nice numbers!

I'm going to do one more demo that makes fireworks and then its off to other areas of the framework!