I finally got some energy up to get back into some of these side projects.
I played around with the renderer a little in LevelEd. I first tried to use a timer to continually draw the viewports and while that worked it had it’s share of issues. For example, whenever I would click and drag the mouse it would stop updating because, obviously, the timer messages were stalled while I was hogging the message queue with mouse updates.
After that I decided to take a shot at putting the rendering on a separate thread. This worked out great once I sorted a few small code niggles out. It isn’t necessarily faster (although it IS in certain cases), but it’s definitely more responsive since the main UI thread doesn’t have to wait anymore for the viewport to draw before processing more user input.
I also looked into creating a Framework for all of my common code. Previously, I was just including all of the common source files into each project that needed them. This worked but it was a hassle since every time I added a new class to the common code directory, I would have to remember to add it into each project that used it. With the Framework created (which loosely explained is sort of like a DLL in Windows only better in several ways), I simply link against that common framework in each project and now I never have to worry about it again. It’s all magically updated! As an added bonus, I don’t have to install this framework on the users machine since it’s embedded inside of each app that uses it. This isn’t the traditional way to use a Framework but it seems the better choice for something where you don’t want the user to have to install anyway, which is what I’m after with the ToeTag suite.
