Blockhead dev log #23 (Patreon)

Addition of the BIGFONT is almost done. It's been a horrible time trying to bend the layout engine to my will. This is the first time during development where I've felt like I've been really fighting against Godot to get it to do something.

The changes I have been making to support the larger font option means I have had to revisit of lot of UI elements and so I've also taken the opportunity to optimize some things, especially the sample blocks, since I'm having to change them anyway.

One bug I have listed in the public issue tracker is that creating a lot of blocks in one go is really slow. This is because when a new block is created it also creates instances of all the associated editors up front. When creating just a few blocks this isn't really noticeable but when dropping lots of samples or cloning a lot of blocks in one operation it can be a huge waste of time, especially if those editors are never actually opened on that block.

So I've now modified the sample blocks so they only create their editors the first time they are actually used, which has sped things up massively but it's still slower than it needs to be. As mentioned in previous development logs I plan to do a big refactor of some chunks of the UI code once the initial feature set is finished (track-level effects being the major milestone). At that point I will try to optimize the way blocks are created as much as possible and always defer creation of their sub-objects until they are actually needed.