8.00AM: Clement Freud has died. He gave me an award at my secondary school many years ago. He was very short. Also he was very funny
9.10AM: All the business email stuff is dealt with, time to start work on putting one of the new ships into the game, one I have declared to be the ‘Imperial Centurion Cruiser’. It looks badass
9.50AM: Most of the graphical stuff is done and dusted. Now I just need to add in the data defining this ships damage textures and module slots, and get it tested and in game
10.30AM: The Centurion cruiser is done and looks great in game. Took a screenshot to give feedback to the artist. Everything seems to look ok, so I don’t need to go back over any artwork. Plus the multiple beam lasers look fantastic. I’m pleased
11.10AM: There is definitely a shutdown problem with the game. Dev Studio churns for ages. Must be a huge and new memory leak somewhere. Damn.
11.50AM: It’s definitely a bug with the main battle screen. But where? The sound? graphics? AI?
12.00AM: Interrupted by door to door salesman, thus killing my efficiency. Time to release the hounds.
12.20PM: I suspect this isn’t a memory leak, but just my debug output backing up bigtime because every time I create a blast glare effect (also used for non-penetrating shield impacts), I tell the debugger about the texture I used. Clearly this code is inefficient anyway, because with dozens of the smaller glares I need to have that texture cached, not be looked up so often. The game now shuts down fine in debug, but I need to fix the underlying inefficiency. In fact, it’s worse than I thought. I need a newer, efficient system for shield impacts
12.35PM: Works fine but forgot the original texture was a quadrant and this one needs not to be. redoing it… Also just spotted a graphics glitch with the con trails pulsing on and off.
12.45PM: Having crash issues when trying to do some profiling, Grrrr. I will mull it over some wii-jogging and a cup of tea.
1.30PM: Still can’t get profiler to not crash. Time for tea.
2.20PM: it now crashes somewhere else. progress?
2.50PM: Sod it, I have a workaround, and bugs to fix. some lights in the wrong places, and an idea on how to make drawing running lights faster if they are zoomed out. (check rendered size > 1 pixel BEFORE checking if onscreen, which takes longer).
3.30PM: The debug copy no longer links. some obscure ANNOYING linker error to do with debug and not debug Microsoft crap. Very tedious and I’m not getting actual game stuff done :(
4.14PM: Think it’s fixed, plus I tracked down the flashing con trials bug. It was me not setting the render mode correctly before I drew them, and them getting drawn early if they filled up a vertex buffer before I was ready to render them all. Good old Nvdia perfHUD was my saviour. Now back to coding fun stuff.
6.25PM: Finally got the linking stuff fixed by a total wipe and rebuild. Grrrr. Next on the agenda is adding some better parallax effects, which are a nightmare with 2D + zoom + variable screen res and scrolling.