The speed of the doors

A lesson I learned from Super Comrade Oriam is that as much as I hate to admit it, runtime speed is a great equalizer among games. SCO was bloated, and probably relied too heavily on it's physics simulator. The game ran well, but only on pretty new machines.

When I found doors in the post below, I used a Tile object. When I wrote the rotating 2D array code, I also included twin methods that rotated an array of ints. Is the int rotation faster? I don't know, but it certainly can't be slower. So I took a look at my findDoors() method on my Tile class, and thoght, "How can I make this work with just integers?"

* * *

C# has support for enums, as any good high-level language does. So instead of worrying about "Blocks" and "Block types" I translated all the info I would need into an enum. Essentially, the enum is the tileType, meaning I don't have to compare strings when I want to figure out Block types.

I had to get rid of the idea of a 'visited' block, or at least, the idea of a boolean that lives on the Block object. That changed the logic of my findDoors() in such a way that I couldn't figure out how to move forward. It was one of those instances where I just had to put the idea on a back burner, and let it simmer.

After about a week, something clicked and I knew I knew the answer, I just had to code it. Instead of checking whether or not a block was 'visited', I simply gave it a new BlockType of 'Visited.' 'Visited' is only given to door blocks that have been visited by one of the Peek() methods. So when looking at a door to figure out the width, it must simply be a BlockType.Door. When Peeking() right or down to determine the width of a door, though, either BockType.Door or BlockType.Visited will count toward the width. This is because Doors can share corners. Also, Since each Block is only looked at once, this also guarantees that I won't accidentally make duplicate doors.

Pretty exciting if I say so myself.