While working on my super secret project, I’ve made some improvements to Lardfish. The main improvement is the addition of saving and loading to and from memory, which is useful for packed files (which my secret project uses). I initially though that it would be complicated, but since Lardfish::Internal::InternalLoad and  Lardfish::Internal::InternalSave already used std::ifstream and std::ofstream, I was able to change them to use std::istream and std::ostream, and then used a stringstream to load the data in and save it out. It basically meant that I had to change very little code to add the feature.

The files on the website have not been updated yet, but I will do that asap.

Most of my time is being spent on the secret project, and work for WorldWeaver, which is why there hasn’t been any updates recently. I will try and update more often. Not that anyone (other than bots) read, heh.

A new version of Lardfish is avaiable here. There are more details on the page.

I also recently tried out the Visual Studio 2010 Beta. It was nice, I especially liked the External Dependencies filter in the project. That would have helped me with a problem I had some time ago. The one major problem I had with it, and the reason I’m not using it now is the stupid blurry font in the intellisense dropdowns.

Not sure if it’s intentional, but apparently it’s a WPF thing that makes fonts accurate to how they should be rendered, where GDI just used to do it to the nearest pixel. I don’t know enough about fonts to tell if it looks right or not, but it seriously hurts my eyes and gives me a headache pretty much instantly.

So yeah, if they fix that I’ll use it.

Somehow I’ve managed to not get around to updating the site for nearly a month. I’ve been busy at work with the DXMesh API, I keep having to go places at weekends. Anyway, in the last month I’ve updated Lardfish to use exceptions, to make it load from files safely. It can now handle incorrect file types, broken files and the like. Overall it seems quite hard to break, which is good.

At some point I may change the Lardfish format to allow for larger files ( > 2^32 bytes ). It would mean changing it to use 64 bit offsets into the data blocks. Also will need to look at streaming the file in, or loading and unloading based on access. At present it loads it all into a block. With larger files this may use a lot of memory. Ideally it would only store the beginning parts, and transparently load data as requested.

On the GFR2 front, not a lot has happened, as I’ve been a bit lazy. I have however solved the random flickering issue with updating text. Apparently I had a Begin/End scene in there for some reason ( oops ) which was causing a jump.

On the todo list is converting Radnom::IRXSprite plugin to use Lardfish, and updating the Lardfish download on the site, which I will do soon.

I’ve been a bit busy at work in the last 2 weeks, with all the import/export stuff, and now the mesh splitter. Also, my internet at home has been cut back to 70K again (thanks Virgin), which is why I’ve not posted until now.

I’ve improved Lardfish slightly, adding some exceptions for bad files, things like that, which is clearly better than just crashing or reading random data. I decided to use exceptions as opposed to error codes because then the user cannot ignore them. Well, they can just wrap it in a try catch block and catch everything, but then that’s their problem.

I’ve also worked on the editor for GFR2, which is coming along now. I have decided to reorganise the Editor/Main Game relationship though, which should be done sometime this week.

I added the first version of Lardfish here. I will probably add a new version soon, since this version  didn’t take very long to do, and has some points that can be improved on.