Arg. Try this again.

I was half-way through posting my blog entry when I accidentally hit command-r (refresh the page). D'oh. Bye-bye blog.

Fortunately for you, that means I'm more inclined to be less verbose this time around. :)

I managed to get a ton of work done today.

For starters, I sat down with my business partner and we decided on a name for a gaming-related web site we're going to be building, as well as settling on the basic plan of attack in terms of which target markets to approach in which order, and what our immediate TODOs are to get things off the ground. We also covered some geeky sysadmin type stuff, like the best way of backing up SVN -- I have a lot to learn on the tech side from my business partner. He's very very very smart. I put together the initial framework for how our SVN repository is structured, and how apps/users/tools/etc are laid out and administered, how differences between environments are handled, and so forth but now that he's on board he's beginning to take ownership of that stuff. It's fun to watch him take this over and replace my relatively-well-reasoned (based on 5+ years of experience with this stuff) tools with tools that are simpler, and more powerful.

After that, I decided to do some of the scut-work on Harmonic Convergence. I finished added and adjusting the last art assets from Ros, so the final visual touches are there for her skins. I discovered recently that Torque (or at least TGB) doesn't like having lots of small images. A single 1.5MB PNG takes 180ms to load, but 180 PNGs that cumulatively weigh in at less than 1.5MB takes closer to 18 seconds to load. No wonder my load times are so painful! So today, I set out at merging images into keyed imagemaps. I've got about 1.5 skins completed so far (resulting in 24 fewer .png files). Combining image maps yielded a small reduction in total file sizes, but it also led me to discover a dozen or so images that just aren't needed anymore (woohoo*). Even better though was that I discovered that the images used for the particles in the Radioactive Rose skin were each 128x128. Ack! (Picture a few hundred tiny particles floating about on-screen, each of them drawn from a 128x128 texture. Oy!) So I shrank them down to 24x24. Besides saving another 80kb (beyond the 25kb I saved by merging stuff into a keyed imagemap), I saw a DRAMATIC improvement in framerate -- I never got RR to drop below 30fps! YES! Previously, getting it to drop into the 10-15FPS range was not much of a challenge.

Also, Magnus discovered a crash bug which is nice and cleanly repeatable. I love it when bugs are repeatable. Makes them so much easier to track down.

* - Ordinarily the Torque Packaging Utility would do this for me, but my game predates it somewhat, so the way things are laid out tends to confuse it...

A good day. :)