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Last night I gave my game a bit of a test by adding 30 Brenns. These all followed one of two scripts. Etiher walking clockwise & counter clockwise around the block. I wanted to see how my code would stand up to a large population and I was quite impressed. The only time it slowed down was when there was about 10 actor on the screen at once. Other than that is was fine, which is great as I have always wanted to populate the adventure with lots of characters. The game only lost about 10 fps when there was too many sprites on the screen and since it is still running at 60 fps I have a plan. 60 fps does feel a little quick for the animation, so I was going to put a frame limiter in since not all hardware will run so fast. 30 fps is quite playable, which would mean on most tablets you wont see any slow down if too many sprites appear on the screen.

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Everybody wants to write a book and it seems these days everybody is. Deep down I've always wanted to write something but I'm no word-smith. So I finally spent a few days putting together a small idea I had whilst walking through Woking park, from work, in the evening. So here is my meagre attempt at story telling. Be gentle...

For the last week or so I have been adding a few more improvements to the Scrolly Adventure. Firstly you can now set the position of a door and Culain can enter them. Simply stand in front of the door and tap it. The door will open and Culain will walk in. Doors are able to transport actors anywhere on the map, so they are not limited to just allowing you move in a direction by one step. This will allow the addition of portals or tele-ports for free.

Also I have added scripting. So far a script is able to tell an actor to walk around and repeat the process. By simply adding a vector to a script command, the actor will attempt to walk towards the given map coordinates in a straight line. By applying several walk commands in a row I have got another character, which currently looks like Culain, to walk around the block. The final command is a 'goto' which starts all the commands over again. Using a base class I can simply add more and more commands to do different things, pretty much the same as what a player can do with Culain, such as buy goods, enter doors etc.

My next aim is to include test cases for both commands and a list of tests for each actor. This means the actor can make decisions depending on time of day, position or by who is near that actor. A true or false result can kick off other script commands. This will then lead onto the speaking ability which exists in Dun Darach.

Oh one more thing, I have discovered that the slow down and flashing bugs are down to the debugger. When I run the game properly without any debugger attached it runs fine and at about 60 fps.

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Blake's 7. The best TV theme tune ever?

I've finally got the town populated. I can add each person via the XML and everyone is individually placed and faces the right direction depending on which way the camera is facing.

It has taken awhile as there were a couple of nasty bugs to track down. The worst was the canvas used to create the backgrounds. If you start on a short road, then the next one would only draw as far the last length. I think the clipping for bitmaps must have been set when the first bitmap was created for the canvas. My quick solution is to recreate the canvas as well as the bitmap every time I want a new background. There doesn't seem to be any noticeable lag, so I'll see how it goes as I know creating new objects in Java is expensive.