Nearly There

I just wanted to let everyone waiting on a release know that it's coming in the next few days.

The last month or so has been pretty infuriating (physics code usually is, at least for me).  I've been slamming my head against the same brick wall nearly the entire time.  I've had functional actors (my term for sprites) most of the month, but the system has been plagued by nasty performance issues.  I spent most of my time guessing at what was wrong and running tests to eliminate possibilities.  I eliminated at least 40 potential causes, with many of them getting me tiny millimeters of progress, when I was hoping to move by leaps and bounds.

The short synopsis of what was going on seems to be that it was a very subtle garbage collection issue related to both my code and dyn4j constructing many temporary Objects.  This afternoon I got it running somewhat reasonably though a mixture of caching and more targeted Object creation .  I'm still not happy with it, but I'm content enough to make a release.  I will attempt to improve it more in the future.

All that's left to do is some code clean up (some Classes need a re-write and I've got bits and pieces of failed experiments/debug code all over in the actor system to get rid of) and the next update will be the first release of Soda Edition.  Again, that should be in the next few days.

The release after that is likely to be an art update, because I need to do something fun to blow off some steam.  I've got some fun ideas related to a new way to make hexagonal blocks (Yes, I admit it, I love the look of these!) that are one hex per block, without a wrapping border.  I'll probably use the idea to make a diamond plating block and possibly a few other odds and ends.  I'm not going to replace the old hexagonal plating blocks, because I want those to remain square-edged.