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15:56 Friday, 13th of June 2008
No images from the game today. I've been stuck with a bit of the engine functions, mainly loading textures. Using 1600x1200 24-bit PNGs (for a 1024x768 background, even) turned out to be a bad idea, but even resizing them to 1024x768 leaves loading times of at least a few seconds. This is in no way acceptable when transitioning from one part of the map to the next, so I have to load the images when the game starts instead - to keep some sort of flow in the gameplay.
Of course, this just means that the combined loading times are gathered in the beginning. Not a big problem per se, except for the disturbing white background (and the general 'not responding'-ness of the game). An obvious solution used in most games; a loading screen.
It turns out that there is really no good way to use crossplatform multithreading - fork() is mainly available on *NIX systems, but doesn't even exist on win32. I don't know what I'll do for now, but perhaps the user will settle with a 'loading resources, please wait ...' splash screen. That's the plan for now, anyway.