As I look back over my past few posts I can see that many of them were made at the wee hours of the morning. That time of night is my most productive, but apparently not so much for my writing. In a similar mindset of looking over my recently made mistakes, I’ve taken on Bombard360 as my final project in Software Design and Documentation, the computer science capstone course at RPI. Within an hour of looking over the changes required to fit in a level editor I realized that there were a good many poor decisions made in construction.

First of all, the classes don’t follow anything resembling MVC. This means the views are actually the parents of every game play object. This makes display very easy, but it lead to some problems when I wanted to show each sprite without its currently coupled game logic. Working on Eucalyptus is what brought about this revelation in the first place, so I’m glad that project isn’t going towards a useless assignment that I need to churn out.

Secondly, Bombard360 still has one major technical flaw that I have yet to address. The massive 20x20 grid for play works great on the PC but displays improperly on the XBox 360. I was expecting the view to scale to the TV’s height, but it doesn’t. Not sure yet about a work around.

Lastly, resource (content) references are still something I don’t have a great way of managing. They are currently mapped to an enumerable within a class that manages how many frames each sprites has for an animation. More research is needed on the best way to handle this.