Three Month Update

The last three months have been full of holidays, travel, Fallout 4, and the Witness. And a bunch of coding. I may elaborate more on the details of whats been going on with the code lately, but for now here’s a quick update.

Linux

Despite some annoyances getting linux setup and a proper development environment going, the Linux build is pretty feature complete, and fully playable. I’ve been developing under Ubuntu 14.04. Overall my linux experience has been really good – compared with the last time I seriously developed on linux, circa 1999. If nothing else the linux build shares a lot of code with the OSX version – at least those things that are POSIX compliant, and OpenGL.

I’ve tried to keep dependancies down to a minimum. If your system has X11, ALSA for audio, and an OpenGL 3.2 driver, it should be good. I still have to get Steam integration compiled in, as well as test it on SteamOS. Plus figure out how to package it up for install.

OSX

Banished is fully playable on Mac, although I have a little finishing up to do. Things like fullscreen/windowed toggle, changing some video options, and supporting custom cursors. It also needs the Steam integration, but thats just a different compile with some other options.

While working on Mac has been okay, I’m not entirely thrilled with the way I have the code setup. It needs some refactoring to better separate the Objective-C stuff and keep some of my namespaces from being polluted by including things they shouldn’t.

I had some additional OpenGL performance annoyances, with shaders generating really bad code that took a while to track down. Maybe one day I’ll use Metal and it will be less facepalmy.

OpenGL

The OpenGL renderer is pretty fast now. I had some crazy bugs and mistakes that were only revealed by getting it running on three different platforms. It’s nearly up to the performance of the DX11 version.

Strangely the Windows version still has some things wrong with it in certain edge cases. I guess that’s easy to have happen since Windows is using a slightly modified version of the code due to being able to switch renderers at runtime. At some point I’ll figure out the diffs between the two sets of code.

Audio

A lot of my time was spent trying to figure out how to get identical sound output on all platforms. I looked at a lot of sound libraries, didn’t like something about all of them, so ended up writing my own.

Audio in the engine is now all ogg/vorbis, instead of the Windows specific WMA/XMA. Using some nice public domain software, the ogg is decoded as needed in a background thread, and I wrote my own mixer to blend the sounds. So now per platform, all I need to do is output 5 milliseconds of PCM sound data at a time when it’s needed, and everything sounds the same.

Yes, I know many people will think this is crazy. But it was a great learning experience for audio related topics. It’s also cool in that the per-platform audio code is now about 100 lines per platform, and everything else is common code. As my audio needs grow, I can just extend the mixer. Sweet.

Version 1.05

I still need to release 1.0.5. There’s a few bugs that got reported I need to fix first. I guess I’ve just been distracted by porting – plus working on the two code bases at once is slightly annoying. 1.0.6 will be the first version with OSX/Linux support, so I’ll be glad when I’m only working in a single code base instead of two.

Edit: Looks like the comment section is broken… looking into it.