Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 10-3.
Graph of memory usage over time
Live editing is made possible by making all game objects and their properties uniquely identifiable. Once you
have this system in place, creating new objects or updating existing objects' properties becomes a matter of issuing
simple commands. For live editing, the appropriate user interface is very game-specific.
A remote viewer tool captures the output from the running game and displays it in the browser. A remote
viewer can be taken a step further by having the browser tool send user input back to the engine. My remote viewer
application is very simple. The browser tool requests a screenshot from the engine, and after receiving a screenshot,
asks for another. By having the request for an updated screenshot come from the browser tool, you don't force the
engine to produce and send more frames than the network can handle. This client request is a very simple form of rate
limiting. Figure
10-4
shows the display from a toy demo rendering a tessellated wireframe teapot.
Figure 10-4.
Screenshot of remote viewer
