Dev Blog 04
Soooo... I delayed on this a bit because I thought I was going to have a really cool piece of news to share! But um. Well. That fell through... hard.
For the past few weeks, I've been working on a writing app in Godot. It's been coming along really nicely, honestly, but the biggest and hardest part of it is that I need a rich text editor. And Godot doesn't have a rich text editor.
And thus, I attempted to make my own. Now I'm not going to go into the embarrassing process of this, uh. Process. But let's just say there was a lot of whack-a-mole BS and a lot of having to reimplement things I didn't think I was going to have to reimplement and not really paying much attention to the actual way the code was working so long as it did work and that got me a terrible, but functional, extension, where I could do all my rich text editing in my app.
Great! Right?
Haha.
Well, there I was, taking some screenshots to use for promo materials, like here, or an itch.io page, right. I wanted a big chunk of text to show off my text search tools. I copy/pasted the raw .txt file of Pride and Prejudice from gutenberg dot org and pasted it into a blank doc in my test project.
The whole damn thing locked up. It was awful. I knew my thing wasn't well optimized, so I expected it to stutter. Maybe even stutter a lot. But nope. No it just froze. I'm pretty sure each process frame (and mind, a process frame is supposed to take 1/60 seconds) where it had to do anything involving that document was taking ten, thirty seconds, maybe more. Scrolling was unresponsive. I never figured out if the cursor disappeared because the blink frame finally happened or because of my attempt to move it.
So instead of having a nice app pending beta release to show off this month, I got a horror story and a broken piece of software. Sigh.