Design and Coding.

I've been reading "Rules of Play" when I've had the chance in the last few days and it is very much a text book so the text book pricing fits. I'm only through the first 4 chapters but I like it so far. Up to this point it's very ethereal, and I half expect it to stay that way, but I still find it useful. Just the core concepts of having actions and results be discernable and integrated is great to finally have formalized in my mind. It was something I knew innately but seeing it in black and white makes it real. It's caused me to look back at some things that have been bugging me about Tiki Lounge Blackjack and finally decide to do something about it. Up to this point I've been too lazy to fix them because I didn't think they were that important but now I realize they are. With that in mind I'm going to take the next week or so and move the game to the latest rev of my engine. It really shouldn't involve that much work but it provides me a couple of new tools to add functionality to the game. Most importantly the particle and scripting systems. These are going to allow me to give more feedback to users on actions they take. Hopefully it'll make the game seem a little more intuitive for beginners.

On the coding front I finished integrating scripts into my resource manager this weekend. Now I can easily share scripts between objects in the same way as all of my other resources. I also did some minor refactoring and combined my audio resource manager and texture manager into a single resource manager. The only reason I had them split in the first place was because of the way DirectX handles working on multiple threads. The D3D device really likes to be used from the same thread so I assumed that the direct sound stuff was the same so I split the two to run on their appropriate threads. Ends up only the D3D device is picky, at least it appears as such from the docs and from practice. If I need to I can always split them again in the future.