I’ve decided that it was high time to post a screen shot of what I’ve been working on for the past month, if only so I can look back on it months later and say – look how far we’ve come. It’s very much mostly programmer art (and indeed placeholders from directX) so far as I haven’t seriously put my artist had on since my first proof of concept tinkerings with GIMP and blender a few weeks back. It does show some of the features I’ve managed to hammer together so far such as the text rendering, basic UI and the general lighting/camera angle setup. Boom:
I’m starting to push things in a dark fantasy direction with the hud image there, and the general blackness of everything but I think there is a long way to go before I really nail that aesthetic. Though, with nothing really going on, check out that frame rate!
General code optimisation on an indie budget is actually kind of tough. I haven’t yet found a good, free or nearly free, tool that’ll quickly do function timings yet. What I want is some of the functionality of a VTune like program for a sub fifty pound price.
Robotic Shed 
November 3rd, 2009 at 19:59
Switched out the screenshot with this afternoons lighting tweaks 🙂
November 4th, 2009 at 14:41
Thought I recognised the 3D guy 🙂
I know AMD do a free profiler. Haven’t used it enough to tell you if it’s any good or not though.
http://developer.amd.com/cpu/CodeAnalyst/codeanalystwindows/Pages/default.aspx
November 6th, 2009 at 10:35
There are a few things like http://sourceforge.net/projects/shinyprofiler/ that simplify poor man’s profiling – where you insert macros around the method you’re interested in, and it uses that to measure performance. Useful if you just want to find the method that’s stealing all your processor time.
December 6th, 2009 at 00:43
No posts for a month! I need info about your widgets.
If you’re settled on an official title, you could update your blog title to that.
December 8th, 2009 at 22:39
Or post pictures of unicorns