HD Progress

The Rainstorm has now been converted to HD foreground graphics, with low-res water effects and background.  With the water effect as such low resolution (1/4 size) as it is to get good framerates, it looks pretty awful compared to what it was (1/2 size).

I decided that it's better to have a crummy visual effect with better gameplay than the opposite.  The only way I think I can get good performance out of this game (mostly the water effect) is to convert to C++/OpenGL once the PlayBook native SDK is released.  And I do want to do that.  One of my coworkers today had a great idea to make the game more fun, but it will be a lot of work.  I might just have to save the idea until I port it to C++/OpenGL.  Of course, there are other games I want to do in 3D...

I previously mentioned how I got high-quality foreground graphics with low-quality background, and yesterday I thought of  a much simpler and probably faster way to do it, so refactoring was much less of a headache.  In short, the app now runs at full resolution, including all of the foreground bitmaps and such (no scaling down),  and the background is rendered at low resolution and upscaled.  That way only one thing needs to be scaled, rather than a whole bunch of things.