RubyCube progress

I got some more time to hack on RubyCube so from my original almost ready post I got the following done:

• Finished the stress test
• Finished first pass of documentation (rubydoc)
• More test cases for basic functionality
• Perspective transform is working

Working on the above items exposed some underlying issues that need to be addressed.

• Object destruction had to be optimized a bit. This is a bit tricky due to multithreading issues. Basically once the ruby script calls the registered free callback the object is marked for cleanup. The graphics/update thread handles reclaiming the actual memory in the main loop.
• I couldn’t find an effecient way to do game timers in ruby. This code looks nice but creates too many Time objects:

stopTime = Time.now() + 60
while(Time.now() < stopTime) do
  puts "thinking"
end

So a custom solution has been cooked up. This ties into the existing low level events system used in rubycube (uglier but fast):

timerId = RubyCube.set_timer(10, -1) # interval 10 seconds, repeats forever
loop do
  event = []
  while(RubyCube.read_event(event)) do
    if(event[0] == RubyCube::TIMER && event[1] == timerId) then
      puts "hit timer"
    end
  end
end

• I cut the number of animation types supported and am still working on a test that exercises all of them.

Remaining things TODO:

• Animation tests
• Timer tests

Things that have been cut for the first release:

• Proper lighting support. This really limits the usefulness of perspective mode.
• Physics support. The APIs are there but not tested or supported for now.

Current priorities for second release:

1. Lighting support
2. Texture/Material support
3. Physics support
4. Any user suggestions