Progress report: 11/1

I've been working harder on updating the game than updating this blog. I've made a lot of changes and additions.

• When a player walks inside a building, the roof disappears.
• Units other than Players now exist in the world.
• When you mouse over an item, or a NPC, or anything else, the mouse cursor changes to reflect a default interaction with that object.
• Units (a class of objects that includes Players) now draw shadows beneath them, so it's obvious that they are standing on the ground.
• When you are preparing to drop an item on the ground, an item 'shadow' appears in the world where the item will be dropped.

I also have done a ton of back-end programming, setting up flags for NPCs and mobiles, etc. I also nailed down mouse interaction so that it's absolutely perfect. Unfortunately, this has cost me a good deal of fps (I'm down to about 70% of what I reported earlier). My goal with this engine is to make it run at good speed on just about any computer out there, so this is a little disheartening.

I have a cell-bio test coming up on Monday, so I need to study for that. Today, I'm only going to work on one thing: implementing a visibility culling test so I can reduce the number of objects I'm drawing per frame. I anticipate that this will net me a 1.5x speedup, or possibly more.