Visuals
Although I don’t want to do much more about the visuals. There are still some things that need to be improved. Improving the visuals themselves is something for a later stage. One thing that was planned to be fixed now was decoupling the visuals from entity types. This proved more interesting than I expected. And I do want to decouple more stuff.

It feels very nice now to just call one function to add visual pieces to an entity. And then making it render with a simple for loop and that’s it. No specific rendering code for each entity. As most stuff will just be bitmaps anyway.

Aspect Ratio
Another thing that is finally fixed is the aspect ratio. As you can see below the game view is now properly centered and scaled inside the window. No stretching or cropping. I do want to allow more than one aspect ratio in the future, but for now this is fine. And especially for consoles this is all I need.

Unfortunately I couldn’t really motivate myself to do much work again. At least I got around decoupling part of the visuals, but not everything is running through the new code path. And I didn’t finish the video about aspect ratio which had another very useful fix in it. But at this point I am happy I did something and I will try to push myself to finish some videos throughout the week. As the next thing I want to do is decouple and clean up the entities. I thought it wasn’t necessary, but now I’ve seen what is possible and I have an idea for how I want to structure car movement now. So I think that could be fun and interesting to look into.

Last modified: May 1, 2023