Almost Ready Now

Thanks to Valgrind I've tracked down the last serious bug(s) that I'm aware of, so testing could commence tonight if I were so inclined. I'm having a few client-side performance problems again though, and I'm trying to eliminate or at least reduce those before I package up a build for testing and make a concerted effort to find testers. Small-scale testing would be fine right now, but when I connect to a server with 15 bots connected I have a pretty poor framerate and a few minor hitching problems. Whether I will ever actually get 15 players together at once is a debatable point, but I would like to be able to support at least that many since I see it as a reasonable goal.

After doing some profiling last night I believe I know where the problem is, but because I think it's related to excessive memory reallocations in the rendering code I can't be sure until I have a chance to try reducing them (all I can see is that a lot of time is being spent in libc.so which on my system doesn't have any symbols to indicate exactly where that time is being spent). Even if it turns out that isn't the problem, the way that I'm currently allocating memory is completely naive and wasteful so it will be good to fix that and avoid future problems relating to it.

This time I'm going to learn my lesson and not make any predictions on when I will be ready to release what I'm now referring to as a "pre-beta" build, but with a long holiday weekend coming up it shouldn't be long now.;-)