The five P's

Before I move on with more tutorials, I'm going to do a little R&D on a few logistical things that I want to improve and/or be sure will still work once we're further down the road.

I want to reduce the number of calls being made to SpriteBatch.Begin and SpriteBatch.End, so a maximum number of sprites are actually sent as a batch (rather than having hundreds of "batches" of 1 sprite each, which is not exactly the optimal way to use SpriteBatch). I have an idea for this but I still need to play with it this week.

What I've been playing with this weekend are ways to make certain shader effects (like blurs) happen much, much faster. This is reasonably out of scope of what the blog has covered so far, but seeing as how I want to tie shader effects into the engine later on without invoking a messy refactor, I'm going to get it all straightened out before I continue the tutorials.

I also want to study the idea of a particle engine that will integrate nicely into what's being built here.

So the next tutorial whenever it comes will probably be a quick tour through the changes in Game Studio / XNA 2.0 and then we'll roll on from there.

The five P's are Prior Planning Prevents Poor Projects. Good advice.