Quoted from bingopodcast:I had a discussion with a programmer before lunch today about how I was handling the blinky lights now - he suggested that I -should- be able to do my full-frame renders with a few optimizations. I thought I'd give it a try, since it would save dozens of hours of development time.
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Another thing would be a generic method that removes the illuminated area by rendering the backglass underneath. I should be able to write one method and blink any number of bulbs. This goes waaaaay back to an initial kernel of an idea that I had - make a Bulb class that can be on or off and poll that - rather than class bulbs, though, I just have a method to turn them off - turning them on is handled in my main display method. We'll see, but I like the concept.
Dang, this is making me think WAY too much back to the days when I actually had time to tinker with things like this. I would have to think about the specifics a (fair) bit to recall the fine details, but there is an echo in the back of the head that we used to use an X-OR function on sections of a graphic that we needed to blink (toggle?) quickly. May or may not be applicable to this depending on how exactly you are doing the rendering, but the voices in my head were not going to quiet down until I threw it out there.
Makes you (or me at least) long for a time when hardware implemented 'sprites' were still a thing! 
