Bullets are now implemented!

After the fireworks show here in Vancouver last night (http://www.celebration-of-light.com/), I got stumped with a bug that made all of my actors (bullets and enemies) run erratic. As I was using multi-threading in my factory to prevent a linear algorithm from blocking the UI, I've learned from the past that if you can't explain some bug after 4 hours of investigation, then it must be caused by multi-threading :) So anyway, it has been a long night last night but I finally managed to implement the bullet system in our Doodle Space Wings! I had to rewrite some sections in my Sprite Factory in order to eliminate the parts that were implemented using multi-threading as it had a critical flaw with regards to accessing critical sections of the code. Anyway, I'm happy with the new solution since even without the threading part, I still managed to meet my 60 FPS goal even when the screen was displaying 50 sprites at the same time!

I also had to redesign some of my sprites in order to make them more attractive. It's hard to do everything by yourself but I guess it's a path that every low-budget indie developers have to take. I'm learning a lot of things right now and I'm happy with the way the things are progressing despite the fact that I'm loosing more sleep :)

So next stuff on the list - collision detection, weapon drops, implementing 5 more kinds of bullets, and loosing more sleep :)

Jim