Category: programming

It took me a while to get support for this in. I still need some decent tools to get my particle effects placement faster and easier.

Anyway…. there is now some basic LOD support for particle emitters and the debris particles. That means I can have buckets of both and only render what I need (although tragically you still need to update a lot of it for consistency sake). here’s a screenshot showing debris increasing as you zoom in. It doesn’t look like I’m zooming in the way I cropped the screens, but I am :D

It’s faked a bit with a sudden detonation, so the screen looks a bit sparse, but it looks very cool in the game :D. It’s nice that it fades into view rather than having any popup.

I’ve been adding in hulk textures for all the frigates today, doing texture-atlases for the fighter hulks, and re-rendering some of them to prevent black jaggies around them at low zoom, designing some more AI fleets and generally fixing and tweaking.

I spent most of Saturday wasting my time on code that I reverted. Long long hours were spent working on bloom effects and shadows for ships passing over each other.  Eventually both were rejected. The bloom code simply didn’t look that good, and the shadow stuff proved to be hideously involved and likely very slow. I know people might assume you can do it simply by just rendering the ships to a separate render target complete with shadows, then slotting in the background later, but you can’t, due to laser and particle effects lying ‘between’ ships and also needing to be blended with the map background at render time.

Anyway… who cares :D

What I *have* got working is hulks for fighters. Previously a destroyed fighter was just obliterated by a fairly low res particle effect. The effect still needs improving, but now destroyed fighters linger as debris. Crucially, the fighter hulk maintains its momentum for a while, so they look like their engines just got shot out, and they also drift faster than the big lumbering cruiser hulks. This all looks a bit nicer than before where they just vanished. I also went through and got 4 variants of hulk done for each fighter.

Now I’m rendering out a few more loading screens, and later I’ll work on some improvements to particle stuff. Monday onwards will be ai-fleet design and general game balancing.

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.