The Old Way Will Not Work
Posted by: Ruel Knudson in Developer Blog, DPnP, E-RPG General Development, Player Character CreatorI spent the better part of this week writing out a very complicated bit of controls for the character creators skill selection section of the program. The code was complicated so that the user interface would be very easy. However, there have been some problems. There is a noticeable lag in button press responses. Even after streaming down the code, refreshing menus is taking too long. The problem is that graphically there is too much going on. I went about this the same way as the CRM but there is a more aesthetic appeal in this program. Therefore, it is creating a problem.
Here was the philosphy: Create buttons as needed, then destroy them. This will make it so that a really huge list of skills will not make it take forever for the interface to load. It only loads when you need them. Then, it clears the buttons away when you don’t to clear up some memory space. This was fine in the CRM, but cannot work here.
The alternative was to create the buttons at the beginning, which I may do. A much more complicated method would be to only create them when you need them, but only hide them when you don’t need them any longer.
Both require different code. I will be trying out the latter first, as I think this is the best fit, even though it means more work for me. the difficulty is making it look nice, while still being functional. People really like the look of it, and have made comments about the aesthetic design right from their first look at it. However, because it is done this way, I need to look at more memory friendly ways of doing things. This is something that even experienced programmers wrestle with on a daily basis. I am a self taught novice, so there will be speed bumps like this.
Hopefully it will progress better this week and I can get some screenshots up.
Anyways, back to work.
Happy Gaming.
