Cutting work out for oneself

So, more and more recently I've been wanting to rewrite Rouge with OpenGL.

FUCK.

I just want to make it perfectly clear that I am under no illusions as to how much this is going to suck. A lot, and I mean a LOT, of things are going to need to be redone entirely. Mind you, a lot of things desperately needed redoing to begin with, so that's not even really a loss. And for the most part, the important game logic is still intact; I just need to change what's inside a few draw() functions and I'll be good to go (GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION AHOY).

The thing that hurts me is that a lot of (what I think are) my really cool design decisions get removed completely. Using SDLgfx to resize SDL_Surfaces gets removed in favor of just drawing a larger quad. My (terribly slow) colorMultiply function gets scrapped in favor of a glColor3f call. My hanging on to each image after it'd been processed is no longer necessary, as the processing time is now a nonissue. The hash table that ensured I only keep one processed image/color combination has no use whatsoever. The RGB function I'd made to limit the number of possible colors to keep the size of that table down is pointless and laughable.

Alas, I lay these pieces of code to rest. Let this post be their monument to existence.

Upon their headstone I lay the following benefits that this work-intensive move offers.

• Performance will be vastly improved; memory usage will shrink to at least a third of where it stands now
• I'll be able to more easily have several different-sized images next to each other
• Many pieces of seemingly-redundant code will be removed; drawing routines get easier
• The code seriously needs a good scrubbing anyway

This last point is probably the most important. I'm just going to go ahead and admit it, the code for each menu is horrible and ugly (and frankly, the menus themselves need work). Everything is done with strings, for god's sake. Example: to initialize the player's inventory, I pass a map < string, vector < pair < string, int > > > to the menu constructor, along with an ancillary vector in order to make everything the right color. This sort of thing is barbaric, insane, prone to errors (wasn't able to equip/unequip anything after changing the Item name-displaying code to use abbreviations), stupid, unwieldy, ugly, and a whole other slew of negative adjectives. Point is, it sucks and I hate it.

Where I'm going with all this: when I get back to working on Rouge, I'm not going to do anything to it for a while other than refactor existing code, improving architecture, and maybe doing some goddamn planning.

But first, I need to finish this shmup which I still don't have a title for. Deadline: end of July.