Well, with only 5 6 days left in the month (bonus day!), I'm glad to report I made a fair amount of progress on my Get Something Done goals.

After pulling a three-day "all-nighter" to work on programming homework for class, I decided to pull one for my own projects. I dusted off my lighting generator's code and set to cleaning it up and reorganizing it. Unfortunately, one of my goals (Support for rectangular icon_sizes) requires a rather extensive repurposing of my variables. Previously, I had all of my measurements in tiles. But now that a tile's height and width may differ, a euclidean distance measured in tiles doesn't mean anything, so I'll have to convert everything over to pixels. It's changes like these that create hours and hours of debugging just to find you forgot to "subtract one" from some variable. I haven't started this conversion yet, and I'm not looking forward to it.

Another change is that the generator will be in EXE form instead of DLL. This change is just about done, and I've added a slew of option flags and a help page so it can be run standalone (you know, for all 1 times that will happen). The real advantage is the console output will be displayed to the user, so I can show a progress bar and output errors.

Perhaps the most interesting update is the switch from my old generation method (I guess technically casting rays) to a new one (which I'll just call "light filter strips"). I just finished up the data structure that will track the various levels of transparency that make up the light that reaches each pixel, and I can't wait to use it. Writing the data structure was the bulk of the work, so now I just have to make the generator use it. It's pretty extensive, so I'm hoping to be able to get the semi-transparent objects and arbitrarily shaped (convex) "shadow shape" features in before the deadline.

I guess the last big task I have to complete on it (besides the conversion, blech) is to rewrite my encoded data format to handle all the new features I added. I'm tempted to cut corners and just dump a massive text file, as it is just temporary. I guess only time will tell what kind of time I have.



I have a cat on my lap. Good night.