Beginnings of real profiling, and small additions

So I've almost completed all of the little bits and pieces of my rewriting of my old code, and I've actually added some considerable amounts of other new stuff also while I've been going.

One recent addition was an optionSurveyor abstract class, so now I can have any class derive from it, and register themselves with the optionManager to receive news of changes in specific options. Very useful-- this'll allow me to make sure that as soon as any option is changed, all of the appropriate places will be informed so they can act accordingly- and if they're not, it'll be easy to make it so they are.

In doing that, I've started adding more support for actually CHANGING options dynamically while the game is running, such as resolution and whatnot. Virtually all of my currently used options can be changed runtime now and everything will restructure itself to accomodate the new options, but in setting up things to work with a resolution change (by far the most complicated option to change, since I need to completely remove the engine device and recreate it, losing a good portion of my dynamic data in the process...) I've noticed that I've got something that I'm questioning as whether it's a memory leak or not. "Memory fluctuations," I'll call it.

So I've now dug out a highly recommended profiling tool called AQTime 5 that so far I am [b]very[/b] impressed by. And it's promising much more than I could possibly ask for. With a price tag of only 5 or 6 hundred dollars, I'll have to give some serious consideration to purchasing it. Or a PS3. *shrug* But for now, I'm enjoying all 2 days of the demo that I've experienced so far.

I've been using it fairly extensively (after reading the boatloads of documentation required just to get STARTED with it!) to find many leaks in my code that I didn't even have a clue existed. I hadn't noticed them because they weren't continuous leaks, but rather gradual. A small leak in an initialisation routine here, one over there, etc... As opposed to something that's puking out 3mb of ram every 2 seconds, which I'm happy to say, I've caught all of so far.

With the help of this profiler, and having to patch up various small leaks, it's also forced me to structure some of my code in a better way to allow for some future code that I'm planning on as well, which is good. I think AQTime 5 and I could become pretty good friends. *sagenod*

Since I'm not even going to look back at all at my old GUI code, I can't get any hard numbers for you, but I know for a fact that now that it's about 98% recoded, I'm quite confident that it'll run significantly faster, cleaner, and more readably (I know, the last one only affects me..) than ever before.

I've also gone so far as to download the DirectX SDK and recompiled Irrlicht with symbols to help with my debugging, as well as allowing me to compile it without certain features that I never intend to use, allowing it to be significantly smaller, which is good. I won't know for sure how much smaller I can get it until I've virtually finished the game engine, but I suspect pretty small, as there's a lot of stuff in there that I don't necessarily need ^^v