First Nastyish Problems

Now that the first phase of getting the basics up and running is done I'm starting to confront the nastier issues of getting this project to resemble a game that might, some day, be fun to play. Not to mention fleshing out the game's internals so they function as I originally intended them to.

The focus of the effort for the next couple days is on getting the graphics system batching objects to be rendered correctly.

The concept behind batching is to group together all similar objects to the video card in one big chunk. The hard part is that my graphics system is meant to contain very different types of objects (e.g. both 2D particles and 3D models) in a particular scene.

Technical crap below
My solution is to build two interfaces. The first, known as IRender, represents a complete drawable thing, for example a laser cannon on a fighter. This exposes objects which have the second interface, IRenderPart. These represent a piece of the whole object which has its own special appearance. For example an IRenderPart could be a glowing tip on the laser cannon and a second could be the actual body of the cannon.

The IRenderPart is the critical piece for batching. The IRenderPart exposes instructions on how it is to be drawn. The rendering enging groups all IRenderParts with similar instructions and draws them all at once. This, in theory, saves time used in sending different sets of instructions to the game console's video hardware since each set of instructions only needs to be sent once.

The big advantage of using interfaces is that they allow the graphics engine to see only the information it cares about to group the objects without having to worry about what, exactly, those objects are. This addresses the nasty issue of handling the variety of visible objects in the game that need to be drawn.
End of technical crap

Now it's down to implementing the changes. I'm approximately 25% done. In addition I need to implement a performance measuring harnass in the game so that I can perform adjustments to the game's code and know exactly what effects they have on the game's speed.