Yes, the console is indeed very helpful for debugging and testing. Even fine-tune aspects of the game since everything is executed in runtime. Let's thank Lua for that! Besides, I always wanted to have an engine with a Quake-like console
The script itself is processed
very quickly. I will be discussing more about the internals of Kinesis soon, but it's all basically a network of C pointers. So the "creation" process of the gameworld is truly instant.
Another aspect that helps a lot is the fast loading of nodes. This was a key area that I wanted to improve. In comparison, Scratches took 2-3 seconds to load nodes... very slow. Kinesis loads them (most of the time) in 300 MILLISECONDS. And never in more than one second. On top of that, we're using some very high textures for Asylum: 2048x2048 pixels, enough to warrant true HD.
The trick is that we pre-compress everything in a format suited for the engine. It does help that everything is done behind scenes in plain C with minimal dependencies and very optimized OpenGL code. Again, Lua is amazing as well; incredibly fast, small and simple implementation!
