Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So we’ve been doing meet-and-greets all weekend (except Friday) because on of our main Robin is injured, the second main Robin is hand balancing over in Korea, and our back-up Robin is doing stunt training out in California. Funny huh? This is the first time all season that we had to cancel shows due to a limited cast. Oh yea, and both our Batmans are away too 😛

But that’s okay, because instead of having to do boring meet-and-greets (where you shake people’s hands, take pictures, and listen to little punk kids razz at you) I was pulled over to the haunted hayride. Well, it really wasn’t a haunted hayride. They disguised it this year as a behind the scenes movie tour. The premise is that an indie film is being made about Six Flag’s urban legends, and the people on the tour are getting a behind the scenes look. Of course, we have air cannons and scary monsters that jump out and scare people anyways. I’m a plant. No not a frond or leaf or anything like that, I’m an actor placed on the ride. I’m with my “girlfriend”, and our parts come into play when we “run over” a girl. (We hit a speedbump as she comes up to the wagon so it looks like we run her over). I start yelling at the tour guide to stop the tractor, the tour guide refuses, and my girlfriend begins to scream hysterically. We argue for a few seconds as the tractor pulls us farther away, when all the sudden a killer hops on board, grabs me, we struggle for a second or two, then throws me off the wagon to the ground (pavement – wheee) and stabs me to death. Then I hop up after the wagon passes out of sight, and run back to catch the next wagon.

Over and over and over again. For three hours.

Yea, the repetition started to get to me after a while, even though me and the other “boyfriends” swapped girlfriends and we changed the person playing the killer three times. Still, it was pretty fun watching people scream as I’m yanked off a moving (albeit slowly) vehicle. I had soft foam elbow and knee pads under my clothes, so I suffered little in the way of bumps and bruises… cept for my hands. I should have worn my motorcycle gloves. My palms are pretty bruised from repeated contact with the pavement. Oh well, lesson learned!

So that was my day. It was fun.

I finished mocking up the rest of the log reporter. Nothing special, I’m in a hurry to start coding. I’ll start tomorrow. Here are the final screens:

Profiling

Ok, the idea is that in the source you can bracket whatever code you want by pushing and popping “keypoints”. These keypoints time the interval from push to pop, and can obviously be nested. Hmmm… I didn’t think about the nesting… maybe there’s something I can do with that visually. But right now I just list the various keypoint names. You select a keypoint, and it displays the line chart that tells you how long it took to execute each keypoint each frame. You can click on the node to get the keypoint info (start, end, elapsed time)

FPS

Obviously this is a line point graph, and it’s showing the frames per second throughout the program runtime. Clicking on the node will dump the messages sent and/or error text outputted during that frame, so you can see what was going on that may have cause a major frame rate drop.

I’m sure a lot will change once I actually get to coding the thing. That’s the way it always is tho. I’ll post updates, don’t worry