What's the Scoop?

Recently it's been about experimenting with The Render Engine.  There are a lot of things I want to do, but only so much I can do so that I can get a beta ready.  For those who haven't seen it, I uploaded a zip file containing the v2.0.0 docs to Github.  I've been working with raycasting and tried an experiment with a layered rendering context.

The raycasting works fairly well.  It exposed some more issues in the collision models which have been resolved.  I find it to be fairly quick, as long as there aren't too many rays being cast at once.  I'm using it right now to enhance the vector demo with UFOs to finish out the demo for v2.0.0.  I'm trying to utilize it in an obstacle avoidance behavior so that the UFOs will steer away from asteroids.

I also tried an experiment with a layered rendering context that was a complete failure.  I was trying to wrap the functionality up for adding multiple context layers into a single layer.  One which you could use to make one of the layers active but only have to target the layered context for all of the calls.  Unfortunately this didn't work out as I had hoped.

Additionally, I updated the AccumulatorParticleEngine so that you're able to switch it between streaking particles or blurred particles.  The blur effect is pretty slick, but also consumes a few extra cycles so it might be more of a "neato" factor than a practical use.

Finally, I started work on particle emitters.  The emitter will be a general class that can, and will, be attached to a component to allow game objects to emit particles.  I expect to get that finished and into the repo by later this week.  Then I'll get back into tile maps.  Now that ray casting is working as part of the collision model, it should be useful for creating tile-based games.