A Day Of A's

Work

A list has been compiled of all the bits and bobs that need to be in the engine for next week, and given A, B and C priorities. My mission is to blitz through them as efficiently as possible, not to hack them in but make sure they are rounded enough to be functional and stable.

Quest one was to quickly sort out some rendering hooks for the Rift work that a fellow coder is working on, and get that emailed away.  It went very well with some small tweaks to the Camera module and some in the new Rift module, then away for more hardware testing. Alas in practice the module keeps coming back to me for more tweaks throughout the day, such is development.

Quest two was to go through and hit all the easy A's in the list which was weapon mode change when in zoom, clean up F1 help and stop some buildings disappearing. The last one being a potential time-drainer. The first two happened to be a walk in the park, and you can now switch out of zoom mode via keys or mouse wheel, and the F1 Help Page in the editor looks much nicer. The disappearing buildings however proved more illusive...

The first job was trying to reproduce the issue, as it does not occur all the time, and then only in certain circumstances. After much ado, I managed to figure out through my earlier prototype that when you mix lots of different objects in close proximity, and more than five for sure, the instance stamp objects flicker for a second. I also notice some lag as the dynamic vertex buffers are being taxed (or new memory sought). It's the flicker which leads me to believe it is the thin end of the wedge that is causing the buildings to disappear completely in the engine.

This is the clue I will begin Friday's hunt for this mysterious and annoying little bug.   If I can crack it quickly, I can move onto the more exciting 3D Editing Mode which will allow you to stand in the test game and edit your terrains from the first perspective. Should be exciting (if I can just fix that darn disappearing bug).

Play

My bead system is working well. My magic abacus, the one that assigns 'distraction points' to individuals via the sliding of a bead, ensures that my focus is maintained through the working day.  It's good fun too!  Nothing else to report on the non-work side, no time to play games this week but should find a little time over the weekend to charge up another game, perhaps FarCry3, which still sits in it's shrink-wrap.