New Code

A dozen classes later and I've injected a mock into my rendering thread so I can interrupt draw calls and simulate almost the entire process. This basically makes everything up to the draw call unit testable and turns my code into the most complicated of bagatelle machines.


Network packet arrives in one end, bounces from pillar to post, draw call comes out the other end!


This brings me a little close to Alpha, but more in a holiday-spirit-playing-with-code sense than the typical slaving over a hot keyboard.  As I don't get paid for developing Pioneer I've been putting it aside for my birthday and then Xmas and have only snatched a couple of half-days this month.


In general the classes are easier to work with, and places the last stepping stone before adding variable level of detail rendering modes and dynamic shadows.  Its also a little faster/smoother when playing and has fixed a really obscure visibility bug that would sometimes leave you with an invisible brick.


The large benefits have been the removal of a cyclic dependency which has meant I can straighten the code out into a directed acyclic graph. All elementary stuff but removing this particular spanner from the works has been kind of a personal quest. The new object graph (and a couple of mocks) has meant I can easily increase the test coverage, which is the next thing I'm going to fiddle with because I was a bit lazy on that front in the last couple of sprints. I'm probably going to see what I can do about cutting those mock objects out of the test harness too, since they add a potential maintenance cost.