Monday Was Testing Day

Testing is taxing

A little word of advise when testing final release software, allocate plenty of time for it, then double it twice. 

As you can see in the above, there is plenty going on. Seem how many devices you can count, and that's just the ones I used this evening. The great news is that all the bugs have been squashed in the AGK apps and it's really just building new deployments, one tweak at a time.

Monday Meat

The bulk of Monday has been my attendance of emails and related email tasks that built up over the weekend.  I gave everything in my inbox a wide berth while I worked on my Perceptually Challenged Ultrabook app. You can read about it in this weeks blog: 

http://ultimatecoderchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

The midnight hours where spent catching up on some reading, research and learning about what will be happening at GDC later this month. I will be there from Monday night and wanted to know the kind of things going on.

More Reloaded 

The good news is that I found some hours to work on the master project, and we are now at the stage where the objects have been identified from the large map editor project and ready to be re-created in the smaller light mapping prototype. The fun process of lighting them in real time can begin, and once up and running, moved back into the main map editor source (which still takes 3 minutes to compile so I rather like the idea of working in the smaller prototypes which take 3 seconds to compile).

02:59 AM : New Source Layout

To help fast coding, I have split the source code between the types used and the main code, this way my small prototypes can use the same data structures as the main app. My plan is to only make a final compile of the main map editor now and again, with most of my work happening in the prototypes.  The original FPSC development way back when did it like this and I had about ten sub files with their own prototypes to test specific things like A.I, scene generation, e.t.c. Looks like I am going back to my roots.


04:10 AM : Phew, A Lot of Types

I knew there was a lot of code in there, but there is a LOT of code now from various modders that I'm only now appreciating in terms of size!  It might take me four months just to work out what it all does ;)  Amazing features in here, buried simply due to the lack of media and examples that shows off all it can do.  Bringing these to the surface through documentation, examples, assets and small games would be a great boost for Reloaded.


Signing Off

I pretty much agreed with the universe to stop coding at 4AM so I can have a sort of decent sleep and get to see Tuesday daylight. I did not get my objects in the proto but I think I got better. I got ALL the types from the engine in their own file now, so I can link with that when doing future prototypes and when I drop code such as entity control, AI handling or scene building, I will be using the exact same structures the main engine uses. Everyday luxuries for C users, but DBP users have to plan ahead a little ;)