Closer, Ever Closer...

As shown above, I now have actual lore-entries, and accompanying "sketches". Additionally, the backdrop against which they are shown has been changed: the pages were previously represented by a 3D model, but I felt that it didn't keep with the overall aesthetic of the game, and so created a 2D, painted image to replace it; I'm rather happier with the result, I believe.

At least one somewhat-serious bug has, I believe, been fixed: I discovered that with each restarting of the game via the "new game" button, the frame-rate dropped noticeably. The basic issue was fairly obvious: I wasn't properly cleaning up when discarding the old game. However, what wasn't clear was what specific elements were remaining behind; discovering and fixing these involved a fair bit of hunting around, as I recall. While I believe that I found and cleaned up a number of elements, in the end it seems that the majority of the issue sprang from my not fully destroying either my shadow-buffers or their display regions. I'm not sure that all of the cleanup-code now in place is actually important, but the job is done, and anything superfluous doesn't seem thus far to be harmful, so I'm satisfied!

In response to feedback on my "translation" minigame, I've made a few minor changes. Specifically, the "X" that appears beneath a selected word-root to indicate an incorrect match now only shows when actually hovering over such a match, and--rather more generally--the control-tabs used for sliders now have little arrows to either side to suggest their purpose. Additionally, I cleaned up a few polish-level bugs related to the word-root icon: it no longer flickers when moving between letters of a word, and doesn't appear to "jump" when a root is selected.

Some changes were made to the level itself: Specifically, some work went into the distant scenery, the grouping of certain objects, and some tweaks to collision geometry intended to make traversal a little easier for first-time players. All of this is still work-in-progress, I believe.

Finally, a few miscellaneous points: The "ideogram" minigame now has an additional indicator-arrow to further highlight the selected image; the sun- and player- lights should now be more accurately and correctly enabled and disabled; and two work-in-progress lore entries were moved from their previous, temporary locations to the project directory, allowing me to add them to my SVN repository.

That's all for this week--thank you for reading, and stay well! ^_^