Rewrite of the match viewer

As most of you know, we're working on a new match simulator (watch Youtube video). For a while, we've been wondering whether the program code behind the match viewer (responsible for translating match data into moving pictures) was good enough. It worked, but the code structure had become increasingly convoluted as we've added more features.

Last week, we decided making a full rewrite was worth a try. Our hope was that we this second time around we would be aware of pitfalls and avoid making the code just as complicated and tangled. We'd take one day at a time and regularly consider whether a full rewrite was still worth the time.

When you rewrite software, you often see that you are able to write a piece of software a lot faster than the first time around. Fortunately, the same thing happened here. And the new code design was much better and more comprehensible than the old one.

Also, we saw that the code became much more efficient in terms of CPU usage even though that wasn't our intent initially. Yay! So we chose to continue.

Of course, it's annoying to spend time making something you've already built. However, I'm sure this investment is worth it in the long run.

So, if you feel there's been too few blog post on progress, now you know why :-)

Oh, by the way... A couple of weeks ago I said we'd soon be ready to tell you more about the new tactics editor. However, due to the match viewer rewrite we haven't progressed in this area.

But I'd like to show you this image taken from the design work of the new tactics editor. I'm very sorry its in Danish (sometimes we use Danish in our design work and sometimes English). It's just an image and is not yet implemented in HTML. But I think you can get an idea of how we imagine the new look'n feel will be :)

Have a nice weekend :)