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

Category: gratuitous space battles

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.

Trying to improve armor glow effect

Several people commented on the armor ‘glow’ effect to represent an armor hit, but not hull damage or a shield hit. Ideally the effect says “this hit the ship and got through shields, but it didn’t get any further’. my plan was for the ship to look like it ‘glowed’.
The problem was, that with the whole ship glowing, it looked a bit overdone, and non-specific. After a lot of fiddling, I can apply an expanding and fading sprite as a ‘decal’ to the ship (which is fiddly without assuming shader support, and involves some interesting multi-texturing code and so on…)
Here it is: ( i stupidly called it shield effect test. it’s armor effect. doh!)

Is this better? If not, what would work better?
Cheers!

New video at last

I bought some proper editing software for videos (Sony Vegas Movie studio only £40) and spent all of today learning it and getting this made:

Let me know what you think so far.

Cheers!

Lightning!

I’ve been tweaking and fixing a few small things lately, sounds that do not play, some graphical problems, and some bugs caused by recently introduced new features (I managed to screw up the way shields worked when I added cod to make ‘stacked’ shields less effective.

In amongst this, the only true ‘new’ feature that has gone in is the alliance ‘lightning gun’. It’s basically just a beam laser, but drawn entirely differently. 10 minutes of reading photoshop tutorials got me up to speed with rendering lightning, and then a bunch of rendered strips of lightning later, I wrote code which works out how many ‘chunks fit in a beam, and stuck together a string of them so the ship looks like its electrocuting its enemies.

The code isn’t that simple, because you want the beam to zig zag everywherem, but hit its origin and target exactly, which is a bit fiddly. I also had it change which bits of lightning to use every 10th of a second so it looks like it flickers, and had to ensure that multiple beams from the same ship start at different points so you can’t tell the same texture pattern was being used.

Having said all this, the biggest effort was picking out a sound effect for it, which I’m still not happy with and am not confident is playing right. 30 minutes of previewing sounds of electrical static is a bit wearisome in 86 degrees in the indoors with an overheating PC by your legs.

All good fun I guess.