I’ve just spent the last couple of weeks making improvements to the real-time character renderer, and my test cases are starting to show that the work is paying off. The characters in the game are being rendered much faster than they used to be. I’ve been thinking about adding some real-time lighting. Maybe I’ll give that a shot and see how much of the speed I’ve just gained is lost again.

Tuesday, June 24, 1997

I started coding the real-time lighting for our character renderer today. It’s turning out not to be as hard as I thought it would be. I only have a little left to do, so I should be able to finish it up early tomorrow.

Wednesday, June 25 1997

The lighting code is finished. It looks pretty good (especially in 16-bit color – maybe a future Sierra game will use this). It only slowed the renderer down by about 0.5% (to my amazement), so it’s definitely staying in the game. We’re still having a little trouble achieving a decent frame rate on slower machines when several characters are visible on the screen at once. I’m thinking about writing a lower quality version of the renderer, which would go faster and could be used whenever the game sees that the frame rate is too slow.

Thursday, June 26, 1997

I need a break from all of the really serious programming. I spent today updating and cleaning up parts of the game which weren’t related to character rendering. I’m going to be working on all of the special effects for combat and spells soon, so I thought I would put some finishing touches on the particle system and projectile manager that I’ll be using. There are also some cool effects that I’ll be adding to the panorama renderer (which draws our backgrounds) that I need to get ready for.

Friday, June 27, 1997

It seems like it’s been a long week, and I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of work done. There’s still a mountain of work left to be done on this game, so I’m sure that many long hard weeks are yet to come. I’ll tell you one thing -- right after this game ships, I’m using every day of vacation time that I have.