Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Ah Shoot!

So, I got burned out on working on the block dropping management system on Sunday after I fixed the issues previously stated and there was still errors happening. The system is going to need a complete overhaul. I've got the right ideas, but I'm missing some functionality that I had initially tried to put in(mainly keeping track of the blocks that surround every block), but for some reason didn't work like it was supposed too. So, I need to fix that and then go ahead and redo the entire system.

Instead of working on that, I've been getting the bullet class up to par. I've got bullets firing now, got the bullet chamber up and cycling through bullets, and have the bullets following the correct vectors to where the aiming reticule is currently located. I also got a good speed for the bullets to travel at. One where they are just a blur, but you can still see them, because well, it's a game you need to see the bullets flying through the air. I've next got to get the damage inflicted on the aimed at blocks, which will require a little bit of ingenuity as conventional intersect testing isn't the solution.

Here's a screen shot.


Click For Bigger


I've also ran into an interesting problem with release builds that I can't put my finger on. It just started happening with this last build. And I can't reproduce it with a debug build. When I alt tab out of the app or minimize it a few times, it triggers an unhandled exception. As far as I can trace what's happening on the stack is that for some reason, the application is calling the destructor for a sprite when alt tabing back into the application. This doesn't make since because it shouldn't be being called. It'll definitely require some research. I think I may just try rebuilding though and see if it still happens, a bad build possibly? Who knows.


Only a week left from today until next weeks game developer forum meeting in Ankeny, and while I'm close to where I want to have the game by that time, there is still a lot to do. I'm kind of burned out on it too and have been wanting to take a day off from working on it, but I just can't seem to keep away. Especially because the weather is horrible, it's cold and snowing, and because the company I'm supposed to start working for this week hasn't called me to get started yet. And plus it's too much damn fun to work on. I think I will take tomorrow off though.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One of the main things that bites me in the arse in release builds is uninitialised variables. Debug builds set things to a known 'uninitialised' value, 0xcdcdcdcd or whatever, but release will just leave things as whatever garbage is in that memory location already. I'd make sure you're initialising things before using them - turn up your compiler warning level to help with this.