Switch to something of smaller scope in aim to be able to finish a project from
start to finish. Also allow refreshed eyes to review the existing API and see
what can be improved on after taking a short break from the project.
No longer repeatedly invoke malloc for retrieving memory. Some operations still
leak memory (notably audio streaming). We introduce notion of Transient and
Permanent storage. Transient memory is used for data in memory that is
temporarily allocated (i.e. graphics for that frame's output), and permanent as
more like game state storage.
We now give out pointers from a pre-allocated block of memory, so we have no
allocation cost and benefits of reduced memory leaks. The transient block gets
reset every frame. Any memory allocated within is cleared at no cost simply by
rearranging the base pointer of the memory block.
Until engine architecture can clearly be separated from the game, i.e.
notion of entity storage belonging to game and concept of entity belonging
to engine, worlds/scenes belonging to game or engine- the project will
only refer to Dengine.
Mobs battle in real-time with the hero when in range. Start encapsulating
logic into entityStateSwitch() to organise entity properties changing
between different states.
Introduce basic concept of memory management in MemoryArena. Begin passing
around a memory object to track memory usage and eventually delegate
memory allocations through. Remove the old memory tracker in the debug
object and incorporate into engine primarily.
Add a debug console for logging information and events to the screen in
a console-like fashion. Debug is now initialised after the game, this is
so that you can pass the game's memory arena and font file to the debug
services. Debug services now properly initialise debug element positions
from this information and not through the update routine.
Some functions which should not be exposed in the API have been switched
to INTERNAL scope. We have a notion of an empty texture in World Traveller
that we can pass in situations where we just want to render a solid
colour with no associated texture.
The alternative to this was creating a separate shader for rendering
primitives but would require at some point to expose the AssetManager to
the renderer or the user on behalf has to manually switch shaders before
rendering (non-intuitive).
Rendering using a non-default quad specifies normalised coordinates
relative to the frame buffer size. Hence each render of these frames
should origin from (0,0) any other value is invalid.
