Compile and Run

The engine. Lags. With about 30 sprites.

Hydrogen is the engine that is written in Python on top of Pygame, and is the engine that Lago and its editor use. So I started working on the first level in the editor, adding background sprites and various decals. Lots of transparent sprites. I made a little black cloud sprite that was repeated a lot to add variation to the stone tiling and make the world seem like it was fading out at the edges. Well that killed the framerate to about 20 or 30, and bear in mind, its a 2D game. Maybe I should just throttle the graphics down, change styles. But come on, these days with big video cards and dual core processors, shouldn’t all 2D games fly?

So the decision is to be made: either tone the graphics down, optimize it somehow, or switch to C++ and DirectX or OpenGL. Either one would be blazingly fast compared to this. But of course that comes with the downside that development isn’t nearly as simple. C++ is a good language, but compared to Python, its tedious. Setting up libraries, long compile times, headers and implementations, the whole deal. No more Ctrl+F9 to and bam it’s there. But C++ is the industry standard, so I should probably get back in that game. I used to use it exclusively, and I was the best, the best.

Decisions.