The Second week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.
I'm not going to lie: this was a week of frustration. Source of the frustration was a wild goose chase to fix a shadow mapping bug. As a detour, I thought a windows port could help me solve this bug, with some OpenGL debugger tools from AMD, e.g.
So the sub-goal for the week was a windows port. So far I have been developing under GNU/Linux, and occasionally using the Mac OSX port. There are a lot of things missing in the windows world. One of them is pthreads. Fortunately, SDL includes support for platform independent threading, so I rewrote my pthread code to SDL_Thread code, which has a similar API. I am seeing really bad performance on windows though, and I am not sure what the cause of this is. It could be that SDL threads are slower than pthreads. This needs more investigation.
Other missing functionality in windows world is opendir(3), which I worked around with a temporary hack.
So did anything gameplay-related happen this week? Well, at least I can now read in modular level designs, that were created with my Little Crane World Editor. So at the very least I can build things like parking lots, or spawning-platforms, so that not everything in the world is muddy hills.
