Game

Today I only refactored the code I already had. I had tried to come up with a better way to store the track textures, but I didn't find any. So I simply moved the once internal enumerations and classes from the SAX-parser and made them top-level classes. So now I should really have all the information ready and should be able to implement the code to turn the track information into properly textured geometry.

I had no time today, so only a small change. I started to add the class which will handle the application of the track textures to the track segments. It currently is completely empty, but I have already added it to the SAX-parser. So next is adding some functions to set the data, some functions to format it and then the first part is done. The second part will consist of the code to create geometry for and apply texturing information to the track segments. That will again remove some functionality from the track class making that one simpler.

I think I have implemented the SAX-parser for the track textures (not tested yet). So next is creating a class which will store them. This class will get the slices (small parts of the width of the track), calculate some values to aid in creating the textures and then get a function which creates a track segment. As I expect the track segments to often use the same track texture for quite some time, the evaluation will have to try to create as few objects as possible. It would be possible to create one quadrangle per track segment and slice, but I doubt it would be efficient. So I will track, if the last segment used the same track texture and then the class is expected to add to the objects created before instead of creating new ones.

Nothing much to write about today, I have managed to pass the DTD to the parser and it found some bugs (e.g. I had misspelled "EMPTY" as "Empty"). Then I added some code to handle the first tag and extended the documentation of the parser class. I also had to extend the DTD slightly, I had forgotten a small detail. The track textures are built from a number of slices, some have a fixed width, others just fill some space between other slices. I need to be able to define alignment of fixed width slices to be able to for example put one exactly into the middle. So I added two attributes, one defining what part of the slice to align to which percentage of the track width.

I hope I now have all the attributes and can finally just implement the parser and then the object to receive the specifications. After I have also modified the program so it can actually apply the specifications I will have to define (and draw) a more complex example of a track texture.