I’ve been working on an interface system for CIC and so far it’s coming along nicely. I looked into using XML however decided it would be easier to roll my own file format for the UI’s. I’ve added functionality for array’s of components to be loaded from the file. So far I have images, buttons, radio buttons and containers for the radio buttons.

I’m updating my material system to cache loaded textures. I was giong to update the material system so whenever a new material was created it would check if the identical material (same colour, transparency, texture etc) existed in the system and use that material instead of creating a new one. I decided that although this was a nice generic solution that catered for all cases, it was also slightly slower than I’d like. The specific game engine that creates the materials can best decide which materials should be reused. Keeping a cache of the textures will stop large textures being reloaded twice, however I believe it will be more powerful for the game engine to decide which materials are shared and which should be kept seperate.

That’s about all that’s going on at the moment. The release of MVH will be on the front cover of BH&G magazine Wednesday so things are getting a little busy at work. So far we don’t have any overtime planned although Nick (my roommate) is heading in during the evenings and on the weekend for technical support). Hopefully all will go well and I’ll be on a new project soon.