Potential Games

Technical tasks have momentarily waylaid gameplay integration. I’ve restructured the graphic rendering routines to make the entire painting pipeline more stable and efficient. Instead of independent timers and redundant repaints, world rendering is now driven on a single timed thread, which carefully coalesces all collected dirty regions to repaint as little as possible on each rendering cycle. Most of the rendering cycle is no longer performed on the Swing/AWT event dispatch thread (only the painting portion), making the client more responsive in general.

The immediate benefit is a reduction in (complete removal of?) some avatar blips and jumps I was seeing during world navigation. Any remaining graphic issues will be easier to debug in the cleaner pipeline. The improved design will allow for future performance testing and tuning, as more sprites and effects are added. In fact, aside from general improvement, the motive for these updates is to begin a graphics enhancement process, which will finalize the handling of sprites and effects in the rendering system, allowing integration of better graphics, with the goal of providing a richer world environment.