Howdy! This is my weekly post where I talk about whatever programming stuff I’ve been up to.

MultiClock

This week I made two small changes to the MultiClock 1.2 Beta PR to add an option to remove the dial design. I realized a day or two ago that it was kind of weird there was no “None” option for dials, though I don’t think the screensaver looks very good without a dial. But I already think some of the options don’t look good, that’s not really for me to decide anyway… to each their own!

I also finally remembered to enable ignoreSiblingDrawOrder, which is allegedly a good optimization strategy, because, well, this person explains it as well as I could it:

When ignoresSiblingOrder is false, SpriteKit renders nodes in the order they exist in their parent’s children array — that is, the array order determines which one draws “on top of” the other. It also means SpriteKit has to render each node one at a time, so you’re losing efficiency to OpenGL draw call overhead. 

When ignoresSiblingOrder is true, SpriteKit relies exclusively on the zPosition property for figuring out what order to draw in. This means it can sometimes combine everything at the same z into a single draw, which makes rendering faster. But it also means that if you want to control which nodes draw in front of which others, you need to set their zPosition appropriately.

rickster on StackOverflow

Version 1.2 contains the very important animation system changes that fixes multi monitor support, but I still feel like it needs something more to justify its full release. I’m not sure what though. I do kinda want to redo the animation system more so that hands can move at variable speeds, and possibly even in multiple directions, but… Not feeling that pull strongly enough yet.

There’s also the Apple TV version, kinda forgot about that idea…

Not Much Else

Haven’t been up to much else. I spent a bunch of time playing Lost Ark, and now Elden Ring, so I haven’t been coding again. I am starting to feel the itch though, as evidenced by me changing this website up. Building out the products page made me look for screenshots of Textile, and it really made me miss how much fun it was to play a game that I was building out, so maybe I should pick up work on rpg-laravel again.

We’ll see! Elden Ring is pretty soul-sucking. I think I can hear it calling to me now, gotta run!