After a few weeks of planning the first update and evaluating how it could be made better, coding has begun on an update to my ASCII Invaders game. What was initially intended as 1.1 update may better be called a 2.0 release. First, though, has been to go through the current code and squeeze out all the optimization that I could. I did a lot for the first release, but based on the feedback I got it was not enough. So far the invader move code now works smoothly regardless of the number of invaders left and yesterday I was able to take the time it takes to animate an invader destruction from approx. 20 milliseconds to 12-13 milliseconds. I should be able to apply the optimization I did to an additional part of that code and get it down to the 1-2 millisecond range!
- Stephen
