Polaris: Current development progress

Author: oakwhiz (33 Articles)

I run things around here at Minousoft Software. I enjoy developing games and building DIY electronics.

A lot of people have been asking about Polaris lately, so I’m going to clarify what is happening and what needs to be done.

Current status:

• Design:
  
• Physics:
  
• Gameplay/mechanics:
  
• Optimization:
  
• Testing:
  
• Overall:
  

Notes:

• Design: I still have to clarify a couple of game design issues, and I have yet to even design the artificial intelligence. Many of the other game elements have already been designed, however.
• Physics: I spent a very large amount of time on the custom-made physics engine, and it seems to have paid off. Occasionally I will find a little glitch in the engine, but I don’t expect too many modifications in this area in the future.
• Gameplay/mechanics: I need to work on the gameplay because at the moment, Polaris is just an engine. I also have to fix the bugged resource system, and create a better management interface for everything.
• Optimization: Polaris hogs a huge amount of resources right now. It’s mostly in the CPU department, but occasional load occurs on the GPU.  My own aging PC struggles to keep the framerate up when many ships are created. I’m probably going to add more checking for objects that are too far away, and replace their calculations with faster, more granular approximations. Another idea is to actually freeze processing on objects that can be ignored. However, some progress has already been made with optimization; for example, objects in the game that are far away are not drawn, or things like small graphical effects which require extra CPU time are not drawn. Additionally, I found several ways to ‘recycle’ some expensive physics calculations that were being called multiple times, which increased speed quite a bit.
• Testing: Most of the features have been tested extensively, and debug interfaces have been added, so future additions to the code won’t take long to test thoroughly.
• Overall: I’m halfway there, and it’s pretty much downhill from here.

On a side note, I’d like to thank Chris Walden for his generous donation of $10!