I am back and I wanted to share to you what I have planned for next release of FortRise. I was too busy and did not get to work on this project for like several months and it should be understandable because I had a school projects to work with, and also my personal stuff as well.
This also means that I learnt a lot outside and gain a lot of experiences. So today, I wanted to use what I learnt and use it for the development of the project. Still, do not expect a pain-staking task such as good compatibility with other platforms like Linux, as such is very hard to do, but I am still trying my best to do so.
To explain what this does, Runtime Atlas Packing is simply simplifying how we load images and use them in game. TowerFall uses Atlas to reduce CPU overhead every draw for performance and also optimize GPU memory usage. Such thing that FortRise also embrace this idea, but at come with the cost of having to create the Atlas by your own. Currently, we use external tools such as cluttered or Free Texture packer to create an atlas for us to load it in game.
But what if the loader just do it for us? Well this is what the Runtime Atlas Packing does, is to pack all the images on the game instead. This increases the load times of the game, but from my experience with this approach, it does not really matter.
And by the way, this only works in a zippped mods, you will see why in the next section.
Along with the runtime atlas packing, implementing hot reload now makes sense to do so. This is only works for development mods that uses folder instead of a zipped mods, so if you wanted to disable this feature for production, just make your mod a zip file. This is also the reason why Runtime Atlas Packing only works with zipped mods, we had to prevent a slow reload times as much as possible.
This API let you access a specific folders and files from your mod or other mod by using a metadata name of a mod of your choice.
This is easily accessible via the ModIO class where you put the mod prefix followed by the : (colon), then a mod metadata name.
( mod:<name>/ )
Such powerful API comes along with a helper events called RiseCore.Events.OnAfterLoadContent which helps you to look for all mods
that in the Mods folder and load specific file from that Mod. This API will be used along with
the ArcherLoader by RedDude.
Right now, the ModIO API and Better Pickup and Arrow Registry API are only planned that has been finished recently. Other stuff will be implemented as well.
If you are asking, will there be any breaking changes in this version? Yes, there is and I’ve written a migration guide for those who
are affected of such changes when it is finally out. Some mods just need to be recompile in order to work in this version.
I am working this in a fortfs branch of FortRise, so you can check at the progress by yourself.
OopsAllArrowsMod by CoolModder