Reminiscing

Remember that time when I was trying to track down those memory leaks?
Well I'm proud to say that I found them. All it took was practically a whole day rewriting sections and matching up Adds with Releases.

So now I'm glad to have that mission over with, it's been lingering with me for the past week. I'll even be able to sleep well ... until I find a new mission tomorrow.

Glorious Debugging

Ok, so one week to go till Milestone 2. We've fixed a lot of bugs today and got a cleanish build up and running. We'll be doing a bit of overtime tomorrow to catch up on a couple of things, but otherwise things are looking good.

cheers,
Paul

Another week finished

Well another week into production comes to an end. For the most part of this week I developed the sound assets for the game, which are quite fine if I do say so myself. Need a good rest tonight because we'll all be in tomorrow (Saturday) to do some crunching!

Fridayday-dayday

Yay! It's Friday, possibly my favorite day of the week! How can one be angry, knowing that the weekend is only a few hours away?

Anyway, today we finally got around to fixing things that have been broken for a very long time. Namely, heap corruptions (the worst of the worst). We've fixed a whole lotta problems, but unfortunately we still haven't found them all.
Its a good thing we decided to stop adding new things and fixing the old ones. If there's one thing people hate, it's a buggy game.

So, assuming we can get all these problems fixed before Monday, we might actually have a semi-working game by the start of next week...

At least I hope so, because I'm getting in some testers on Monday.

Progress

A week into Milestone 2, we've made some progress, but not as much as we'd like. Memory leaks are slowing us down. We'll be discussing some of the issues surrounding this our team meeting tomorrow.

That's all for today.
cheers,
Paul

Repetition: Lets do it Again!

I think the hardest part for me with the code is tracking down all the memory leaks. These occur when you grab a section of your computer's memory, but forget to tell the computer that you're finished with it.

Our first line of defense is a nifty program called Visual Leak Detector (VLD) which tells you exactly what wasn't released. The only problem is that it doesn't detect heap corruptions, which is currently what our code contains. Even worse is that they only show up on a release build.

The only way to track them down (that I know anyway) is to look through the code line by line until the problem has been found. I must have looked through it a million times by now but there still seems to be problems.

Mmmmmm.... GUI

As part of our project, we decided to create our own GUI, similar to what Windows provides. This means we've had to make a whole lot of weird things, such as buttons, tab orders, list boxes and scroll bars. The Idea behind this GUI stuff is that we want to try and keep our code nice and expandable; should we ever decide to swap out our renderer or go cross platform, we can change a few classes and the game will work...

OK, so there's a bit more to it than that, but that's the basic philosophy.