Android

Yet another update coming after a very long time since the previous, apologies for that. Well, at least it comes packed with a lot of enhancements from the last months. 💪

If you follow the project on GitHub you might have noticed a big development slowdown during the summer. I blame it on a combination of excessive heat and fatigue that led to a general lack of motivation and perseverance. ☀️

It has been a month and a half of small but useful updates for the nCine. LibPNG The PNG image loader has been modified to support more color types, by copying some code from the libpng example. It means that any nCine game is now able to properly load PNG images with palette or with gray-alpha channels and to expand or strip bit depths that are different than the standard 8 bits.

I have spent some very intense weeks this March to completely overhaul and refactor my CMake scripts. We are talking about more than two thousand lines of code! 😱

During those three months I have been working on two big features. The first one has been the support of SDL2 GameController mapping format. Initially my plan was to build a layer on top of my joystick input functions and leave the mapping code outside, as helper functions in a file distributed along the source of my tests and only linked by them. Later on I decided to refactor everything and bring the code inside the engine, in an effort to make it easier for an application to transparently use it.

During June and July 2017 I have been working as usual, in my spare time, on the project. 😉 The first big June addition has been the automatic screen culling of sprites, a very important feature needed in order to support games extending on multiple screens. The culling works on sprites of any kind (regular ones, particles, text nodes) and regardless of their scaling or rotation parameters. If those sprites are completely outside of the screen they will just not be rendered, saving draw calls from being issued.