New Year / New Plants

Have done quite a bit of development/tweaking over the Christmas break, mainly around rendering speed – now some of my trees are a year old, they are quite big and take a while to render. So have been looking at caching a bitmap for each tree to speed up rendering (rather than the procedural generation used to draw the tree). Is working, but is quite complicated if we want to preserve the animation, and has taken a couple of attempts to get it right. But still needs tweaking.

However – big news – is I’ve completed the bible in a year. Yay! But I want to start again and repeat the bible in a year.

Ah. This doesn’t work. Oh dear.

Ok, it will work if I delete the 2023 bible in a year tree and start a new one. But the way the app data is structured I can’t keep the 2023 tree and start a new one for 2024. (not sure is that is a good idea anyway, as it will impact the rendering – see above).

So, I need to restructure the database so that it is possible to have multiple instances of the same plant/course. This is going to be quite involved and will mean a lot of refactoring of the code around course content and completion. Oh dear, wasn’t planning on having to do that – but I suppose better to find it now than find it an issue later – at the moment it is only me using the app so I can manage the necessary data conversions.

And another idea would be to “archive” the old plant. Eg move the 2023 tree to a static background item, and then I could reset the data so that the user can repeat the course.