Finally add a second option for Chunk MapAccessor implementation besides the
MapAccessor. The RLEAccessor is basically a MapAccessor that will compress
your drawing with Run Length Encoding (RLE) in the on-disk format in the ZIP
file.
This slashes the file sizes of most levels:
* Shapeshifter: 21.8 MB -> 8.1 MB
* Jungle: 10.4 MB -> 4.1 MB
* Zoo: 2.8 MB -> 1.3 MB
Implementation details:
* The RLE binary format for Chunks is a stream of Uvarint pairs storing the
palette index number and the number of pixels to repeat it (along the Y,X
axis of the chunk).
* Null colors are represented by a Uvarint that decodes to 0xFFFF
or 65535 in decimal.
* Gameplay logic currently limits maps to 256 colors.
* The default for newly created chunks in-game will be RLE by default.
* Its in-memory representation is still a MapAccessor (a map of absolute
world coordinates to palette index).
* The game can still open and play legacy MapAccessor maps.
* On save in the editor, the game will upgrade/convert MapAccessor chunks over
to RLEAccessors, improving on your level's file size with a simple re-save.
Current Bugs
* On every re-save to RLE, one pixel is lost in the bottom-right corner of
each chunk. Each subsequent re-save loses one more pixel to the left, so what
starts as a single pixel per chunk slowly evolves into a horizontal line.
* Some pixels smear vertically as well.
* Off-by-negative-one errors when some chunks Iter() their pixels but compute
a relative coordinate of (-1,0)! Some mismatch between the stored world coords
of a pixel inside the chunk vs. the chunk's assigned coordinate by the Chunker:
certain combinations of chunk coord/abs coord.
To Do
* The `doodad touch` command should re-save existing levels to upgrade them.
* Fix collision detection to allow actors to walk up slopes smoothly, without
losing any horizontal velocity.
* Fix scrolling a level canvas so that chunks near the right or bottom edge
of the viewpoint were getting culled prematurely.
* Centralize JavaScript exception catching logic to attach Go and JS stack
traces where possible to be more useful for debugging.
* Performance: flush all SDL2 textures from memory between scene transitions
in the app. Also add a `flush-textures` dev console command to flush the
textures at any time - they all should regenerate if still needed based on
underlying go.Images which can be garbage collected.
Convert the Chunker size to a uint8 so chunk sizes are limited to 255px. This
means that inside of a chunk, uint8's can track the relative pixel coordinates
and result in a great memory savings since all of these uint8's are currently
64-bits wide apiece.
WIP on rectangular shaped doodads:
* You can create such a doodad in the editor and draw it normally.
* It doesn't draw the right size when dragged into your level however:
- In uix.Actor.Size() it gets a rect of the doodad's square Chunker size,
instead of getting the proper doodad.Size rect.
- If you give it the doodad.Size rect, it draws the Canvas size correctly
instead of a square - the full drawing appears and in gameplay its hitbox
(assuming the same large rectangle size) works correctly in-game.
- But, the doodad has scrolling issues when it gets to the top or left edge
of the screen! This old gnarly bug has come back. For some reason square
canvas doodads draw correctly but rectangular ones have the drawing scroll
just a bit - how far it scrolls is proportional to how big the doodad is,
with the Start Flag only scrolling a few pixels before it stops.
* On the failure (but still success) dialog on Survival Mode levels
(e.g. Azulian Tag): make the default be to retry the level but
show a "pity" Next Level button below, as the level is marked as
completed (silver score) and the next one is unlocked.
Previously: the Chunker tracks with chunks were gotten during the
current game tick and the N-1 and N-2 ticks, and chunks not accessed in
two ticks were freed immediately.
Now: they go into a "garbage collection" pool with a minimum number of
game ticks to free. So if they're needed again, they're saved from the
gc pool. F3 overlay data shows the count of the gc pool.
* Editor: Auto-save on a background goroutine so you don't randomly freeze
the editor up during.
* Fix actor linking issues when you drag and re-place a linked doodad: the
level was too eagerly calling PruneLinks() whenever a doodad was 'destroyed'
(such as the one just picked up) breaking half of the link connection.
* Chunk unloader: do not unload a chunk that has been modified (Set or Delete
called on), keep them in memory until the next ZIP file save to flush them
out to disk.
* Link Tool: if you clicked an actor and don't want to connect a link, click
the first actor again to de-select it.
Updates to the `doodad` tool:
* `doodad edit-level --resize <int>` can re-chunk a level to use a different
chunk size than the default 128. Large chunk sizes 512+ lead to performance
problems.
* The blue bird follows the same base AI as the red bird (it has a
target altitude that it tries to maintain, and it will dive at the
player) but the blue bird flies in a sine wave pattern around its
target altitude. It also has a longer scan radius to search for the
player than the red bird.
* The sine wave pattern of the blue bird means you may fly under its
radar depending how high it is on average.
Cheat codes that replace the player character are refactored to make
it easier to extend, and new cheats have been added:
* super azulian: play as the Red Azulian.
* hyper azulian: play as the White Azulian.
* bluebird: play as the new Bird (blue).
Especially to further optimize memory for large levels, Levels and
Doodads can now read and write to a ZIP file format on disk with
chunks in external files within the zip.
Existing doodads and levels can still load as normal, and will be
converted into ZIP files on the next save:
* The Chunker.ChunkMap which used to hold ALL chunks in the main json/gz
file, now becomes the cache of "hot chunks" loaded from ZIP. If there is
a ZIP file, chunks not accessed recently are flushed from the ChunkMap
to save on memory.
* During save, the ChunkMap is flushed to ZIP along with any non-loaded
chunks from a previous zipfile. So legacy levels "just work" when
saving, and levels loaded FROM Zip will manage their ChunkMap hot
memory more carefully.
Memory savings observed on "Azulian Tag - Forest.level":
* Before: 1716 MB was loaded from the old level format into RAM along
with a slow load screen.
* After: only 243 MB memory was used by the game and it loaded with
a VERY FAST load screen.
Updates to the F3 Debug Overlay:
* "Chunks: 20 in 45 out 20 cached" shows the count of chunks inside the
viewport (having bitmaps and textures loaded) vs. chunks outside which
have their textures freed (but data kept), and the number of chunks
currently hot cached in the ChunkMap.
The `doodad` tool has new commands to "touch" your existing levels
and doodads, to upgrade them to the new format (or you can simply
open and re-save them in-game):
doodad edit-level --touch ./example.level
doodad edit-doodad --touch ./example.doodad
The output from that and `doodad show` should say "File format: zipfile"
in the headers section.
To do:
* File attachments should also go in as ZIP files, e.g. wallpapers
* Added to the F3 Debug Overlay is a "Texture:" label that counts the number
of textures currently loaded by the (SDL2) render engine.
* Added Teardown() functions to Level, Doodad and the Chunker they both use
to free up SDL2 textures for all their cached graphics.
* The Canvas.Destroy() function now cleans up all textures that the Canvas
is responsible for: calling the Teardown() of the Level or Doodad, calling
Destroy() on all level actors, and cleaning up Wallpaper textures.
* The Destroy() method of the game's various Scenes will properly Destroy()
their canvases to clean up when transitioning to another scene. The
MainScene, MenuScene, EditorScene and PlayScene.
* Fix the sprites package to actually cache the ui.Image widgets. The game
has very few sprites so no need to free them just yet.
Some tricky places that were leaking textures have been cleaned up:
* Canvas.InstallActors() destroys the canvases of existing actors before it
reinitializes the list and installs the replacements.
* The DraggableActor when the user is dragging an actor around their level
cleans up the blueprint masked drag/drop actor before nulling it out.
Misc changes:
* The player character cheats during Play Mode will immediately swap out the
player character on the current level.
* Properly call the Close() function instead of Hide() to dismiss popup
windows. The Close() function itself calls Hide() but also triggers
WindowClose event handlers. The Doodad Dropper subscribes to its close
event to free textures for all its doodad canvases.
* Clean up unused msgpack code for levels and doodads
* Fix the cosmetic bug where actors in your level would display wrongly
when scrolling off the top/left edges of the screen: they used to
anchor at their own 0,0 coordinate and crop their width/height leading
to a 'scrolling' effect that didn't happen on the right/bottom edges.
In the Level Editor, the "Level->Giant Screenshot" menu will take a full
scale PNG screenshot of the entire level, with its wallpaper and
doodads, and save it in ~/.config/doodle/screenshots.
It is currently CPU intensive and slow. With future work it should be
made asynchronous. The function is abstracted away nicely so that the
doodad CLI tool may support this as well.
* pkg/loadscreen implements a global Loading Screen for loading heavy
levels for playing or editing.
* All chunks in a level are pre-rendered to bitmap before gameplay
begins, which reduces stutter as chunks were being lazily rendered on
first appearance before.
* The loading screen can be played with in the developer console:
$ loadscreen.Show()
$ loadscreen.Hide()
Along with ShowWithProgress(), SetProgress(float64) and IsActive()
* Chunker: separate the concerns between Bitmaps an (SDL2) Textures.
* Chunker.Prerender() converts a chunk to a bitmap (a Go image.Image)
and caches it, only re-rendering if marked as dirty.
* Chunker.Texture() will use the pre-cached bitmap if available to
immediately produce the SDL2 texture.
Other miscellaneous changes:
* Added to the Colored Pencil palette: Sandstone
* Added "perlin noise" brush pattern
Note: this commit introduces instability and crashes:
* New `asyncSetup()` functions run on a goroutine, but SDL2 texture
calls must run on the main thread.
* Chunker avoids this by caching bitmaps, not textures.
* Wallpaper though is unstable, sometimes works, sometimes has graphical
glitches, sometimes crashes the game.
* Wallpaper.Load() and the *Texture() functions are where it crashes.
* Start the program window maximized with the `-w maximized` CLI option.
* Move the Doodad Palette off the right-side dock of the Editor Scene and
into its own pop-up window: the DoodadDropper.
* Shrink the width of the Color Palette panel and show only the colors in
the buttons. The name of the swatch is available in the mouse-over tooltip.
* Added an "Edit" button to the Color Palette. It opens a Palette Editor
window where you can rename, change colors and attributes of existing colors
OR insert new colors into your palette. (Deleting colors not yet supported).
* level.Chunker gets a Redraw method: invalidates all cached textures of all
chunks forcing the level to redraw itself, possibly with an updated palette.
* Discovered a bug where if you hit the Undo key to erase pixels and an
entire chunk became empty by it, the chunk would have rendering errors
and show as a solid black square instead of the level wallpaper
showing through.
* Chunks that have no pixels in them are culled from the chunker
immediately when you call a Delete() operation.
* The level file saver also calls a maintenance function to prune all
empty chunks upon saving the file. So existing levels with broken
chunks need only be re-saved to fix them.
* Implement Brush Sizes for drawtool.Stroke and add a UI to the tools panel
to control the brush size.
* Brush sizes: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64
* Add the Eraser Tool to editor mode. It uses a default brush size of 16
and a max size of 32 due to some performance issues.
* The Undo/Redo system now remembers the original color of pixels when
you change them, so that Undo will set them back how they were instead
of deleting the pixel entirely. Due to performance issues, this only
happens when your Brush Size is 0 (drawing single-pixel shapes).
* UI: Add an IntVariable option to ui.Label to bind showing the value of
an int reference.
Aforementioned performance issues:
* When we try to remember whole rects of pixels for drawing thick
shapes, it requires a ton of scanning for each step of the shape. Even
de-duplicating pixel checks, tons of extra reads are constantly
checked.
* The Eraser is the only tool that absolutely needs to be able to
remember wiped pixels AND have large brush sizes. The performance
sucks and lags a bit if you erase a lot all at once, but it's a
trade-off for now.
* So pixels aren't remembered when drawing lines in your level with
thick brushes, so the Undo action will simply delete your pixels and not
reset them. Only the Eraser can bring back pixels.
* Add some encoding/decoding functions for binary msgpack format for
levels and doodads. Currently it writes msgpack files that can be
decoded and printed by Python (mp2json.py) but it can't re-read from
the binary format. For now, levels will continue to write in JSON
format.
* Add filesystem abstraction functions to the balance/ package to search
multiple paths to find Levels and Doodads, to make way for
system-level doodads.
