Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Another gratuitous day

7.10am Awoken to sound of suicidal duck crashing into bedroom window and leaving comical imprint. AGAIN.
8.00am Arguing with banks on the phone. very annoying
8.30am checking games news websites and dealing with emails
9.00am decided that today I will fix this crash bug that gives me a ‘corrupted heap’ error
9.25am I have reproducible steps to identify the bug, and know its to do with deleting ships before starting a new battle. It’s less clear whether or not its a specific thing being deleted, because in typical heisenbug fashion, nothing seems to trigger it when I step through the code.
9.29am Aha, if I quite the battle immediately before restarting, it doesn’t happen, so its the deletion of some memory allocated at some point mid-battle. but what? I should have used smart pointers (C++ thing)
9.45am Fixed! There was code when a repair module was deleted for it to grab the module it was repairing and tell it that it was no longer repairing it. The problem was that the target module may have been deleted before the repair module was, so when they both get deleted when the fleet is deleted, it caused a crash.
10.00am Fixed some layout issues on the deployment interface, now working on a better ECM beam effect
10.10am Discussing music with my musician over MSN, explaining the different alien races.
10.46am Everything works fine, but when ships with ECM turrets cloak, the ECM turrets don’t cloak with the ship. hmmmm….
11.00am Croissants
12.50pm Still tweaking and fiddling trying to get an ECM beam that looks ok. Resorting to normal beam laser effects now.
1.05pm Thats enough on ECM beams. I spotted some badly placed turrets on federation eagle cruiser, so moving those.
1.30pm The ECM shock weapon doesn’t seem to work, in that affected ships still fire weapons. Investigating…
3.30pm Investigating a sound bug.
4.10pm Working on better visual debugging data for my sound system, to track down what is going on here.
4.25pm Some sound channels do not seem to update, and some seem to be ‘mystery’ sounds which I have no idea where they came from. bah..
6.25pm Still working on the sound code. Debugging has led me to find all sorts of things that were not set up right, but I still have some sounds that ‘linger’ or don’t play.
7.10pm Everything looks like its working now, following some serious re-writing and tidying of the way sound channels get allocated and re-used. I need food and maybe a game of company of heroes.


7 thoughts on Another gratuitous day

  1. Im more of a dawn of war man myself but company of heroes is good keep up the good work!

  2. Space Battles looks awesome, I’ll keep checking back to see when it’s available.

  3. Ah, I love these posts. Quite an insight into the independent game developer’s day. Quite a lot of debugging again! Did you have tea with your croissants? :D

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