User blog:C3PO the Dragon Slayer/Avian Hunt: March 11, 2008

March 11, 2008
Thanks to my whimsical decision made at the last moment to rewrite the whole 3D engine, the first test program will come out later than expected. It still may be released in March, but also could be as late as April. The reason I made the decision to do a rewrite is simply because if I use my own scripts, developed exclusively for Avian Hunt, rather than the generic scripts for the flight simulator tutorial, I can program AI and lasers more effectively. Not that I haven't programmed the lasers or a basic AI yet; it's just that they're remarkably slow and they cripple the frame rate.

In addition, I'm programming the frame rate to be flexible and more cross-platform-friendly. The way it works is that it starts out with a frame rate of 60 frames per second, and then waits for the actual frame rate to calculate. Once it sees how fast the game is going on the computer its running on, it will adjust how often the screen is drawn. This way, there are two rates: a cyclical frame rate, which I'm trying to keep at a steady 60, but may lower to 30, and a visible frame rate, which is how many times the screen is drawn in one second. This way, the computer may lag, but it will compensate by not drawing as frequently and speeding up motion, giving the observer who couldn't care less about lag the impression that the frames per second never drops.

To prove that I do have a flight simulator, I'll show you some screenshots: