July 15, 2006
I have finally solved my random crashing bug, and omfg do computers suck!!
I went about adding mutexes all around my code last night to make any access to an STL container thread safe. It went totally smoothly and I only caused one accidental deadlock by putting a release mutex inside of a conditio…
I went about adding mutexes all around my code last night to make any access to an STL container thread safe. It went totally smoothly and I only caused one accidental deadlock by putting a release mutex inside of a conditio…
July 14, 2006
I am in the middle of trying to fix one of my worst and best bugs ever. I am still getting a random crash at startup probably 5% of the time. I have narrowed it down to a total race condition somewhere. I believe it's in my messaging system somewhere. I'm also pretty sure it's due to my MIS-use…
July 13, 2006
Still seeing the weird crash. Now comes a totally not fun investigation to figure out why.
July 12, 2006
Thanks to the wonderful world of unit tests I was able to refactor my resource manager class into two separate managers for textures and audio in about 30 minutes. Running my unit tests allowed me to know I hadn't made any ugly cut and paste errors that messed things up. Now all that's left is to…
July 11, 2006
By the time I'm done with my current engine I am going to be a DirectX multi-threading wizard. There are just so many little things that can go wrong and I think I've hit every single one of them.
My latest snag comes about in the way of a random crash at startup deep in the bowels of loading an og…
My latest snag comes about in the way of a random crash at startup deep in the bowels of loading an og…
July 09, 2006
One of the unknowns that has been hanging over my head like an anvil has been performance on older machines. I know my engine runs fine on my laptop and my wife's laptop but both are fairly new and have respectable graphics cards. While I know I'm not doing anything crazy or fancy in my game it's…
July 08, 2006
This was truely a crazy week at work. Even with taking Monday and Tuesday off it felt like a long week. Thank god the weekend is finally here!
I have been keeping my early mornings free to work on my own stuff so I've gotten more art integrated so here's another quick screen shot of the in game ac…
I have been keeping my early mornings free to work on my own stuff so I've gotten more art integrated so here's another quick screen shot of the in game ac…
July 03, 2006
Just a couple of quick screens. I got the new art into the loading scene. The loading text fades in and out while the rest of the game is loading. This scene is only shown at initial startup so I now release all the objects associated with it after the rest of the game is loaded.
An updated shot…
An updated shot…
July 02, 2006
Today was another perf related day around the renderer. When I started work on my engine I didn't think about perf at all. I wanted to get things working in a logical, efficient manner but concenrated on straight forward acting code and orthogonality above perf improvements. This meant using thi…
July 01, 2006
Well today is my target date for art complete and I've made it. The last of my artists sent me their work today and it all looks great. I can't wait to see all this new stuff in the game. It'll make things look professional for once!!
I had hoped to get all of my levels completed by today as well…
I had hoped to get all of my levels completed by today as well…
June 29, 2006
I think I have come up with the all important side project/hobby paradox. It is:
To be your most productive you need to know when to not work.
We all have days where we're tired our just not feeling up to working on things. In the past I've sucked it up and powered through these feelings and trie…
To be your most productive you need to know when to not work.
We all have days where we're tired our just not feeling up to working on things. In the past I've sucked it up and powered through these feelings and trie…
June 28, 2006
So recently I went through a perf pass on my renderer where I implemented batching and fun stuff like that. It took me a little bit of work but I got everything working and got some small performance improvements. There's still some perf changes I want to make but I decided not to do them in the …
June 25, 2006
Well I've made the jump and entered my current game into the Intel multi-threading competition. The entry form asked for features that are only going to be available when running on a multi-core system and I had to answer none. I don't really have time to add any new flashy features that turn on …
June 23, 2006
So I'm contemplating entering my current project in both the Intel mutli-threaded contest and the IGF. I don't think my simple casual game has anything that would make it competitive in either contest but it may help keep me focused on my target completion dates. Also any kind of press that could…
June 22, 2006
So I went ahead and hardcoded my threads to have an afinity to a given CPU. I only go up to 4 CPUs so after that I just won't utitlize them with my current setup. Seeing as I currently am running at ~500 FPS on my single proc machine I don't think any of my casual game ideas are really going to t…
June 20, 2006
Thanks to a journal posting by Extrarius I decided to do some research into all the problems I've heard about using QueryPerformanceCounter on multi-core machines. I knew what the problem was going in, bascally making that call on different cores can give you wacky results between cores and in a m…
June 18, 2006
I can't believe that I didn't have a real debug logging system already baked into my engine. I've been using mostly outputdebugstring to capture debug spew but that only really works when you're attached with a debugger. I gave my current project a try on my wife's laptop and everything ran fine …
June 17, 2006
So to answer some perf questions:
1. I am currently testing my engine/app in 2 settings.
A. One is where I let my game loops run hot with only a sleep(0) at the end of each to make sure they play well with the OS. In this setup on my laptop I get ~500 fps in an 800x600 window, and about double …
June 15, 2006
So I started working on the optimizations to my rendering engine. To give a little background on what I was trying to do was to improve the batching of my primatives to cut down on the number of texture changes and D3D Draw calls. It definitely took longer than I had hoped but I now how a simple …
June 12, 2006
When I started working on my engine I tackled things from an OO angle. Every class was clean and separate allowing for great orthogonality (sp?) between game objects. I can just throw together a bunch of textured quads, double sided quads, tile sheets or meshes in any order and things just wor…
June 10, 2006
When I started my current project I made a pact not to get distracted by anything else until it was done. Thanks to the 4e5 contest I am having some serious urges to start another project. I'm also trying to fight the refactoring urges I'm having around my engine. I just so much want to switch t…
June 08, 2006
I've made it to the half way point of level creation. I've completed 26 levels out of my target of 52. It really is a lot of work coming up with level layouts. And not entirely fun.
The good news is that I'm going to give myself a break for a few days. I have all the art for my main menu so I'm …
The good news is that I'm going to give myself a break for a few days. I have all the art for my main menu so I'm …
June 01, 2006
It's been a while since my last entry. Mostly because there hasn't been anything exciting worth mentioning. I've just been plugging away on creating levels. Or in corporate speak, I've been executing. The good news is that my level editor has been paying off like crazy. I easily have saved a g…
May 22, 2006
After a week or so of real life distractions I was back at it today with some level design. The goal is to have 13 stages of 4 levels for a total of 52 levels. Fits with the whole card game theme and gives plenty of game play. Each level has an easy and difficult setting which adjusts the total …
May 19, 2006
My first look at the art I've got contracted out has started to roll in and it looks great! I've gotten so used to my ugly dev art that I forgot what good art looks like :) It's still to early to say that all the art is going to be this good but I'm feeling confident about being able to hit my ta…
May 17, 2006
I've been doing a lot of business reading as of late. Mostly motivational/intro to entrepreneur stuff that is fluffy but still a fun read. The latest book introduced something called the 60% rule. The general gist is:
If you can get 60% of the functionality you need from an off the shelf solution…
May 13, 2006
...is it possible to be sitting around in a coffee shop with your laptop, working on a game and have the VP of a major three console developer sit right next to you. Okay maybe not just in Seattle but there are few places. J Allard is trying too hard to be hip. He needs to tone back a little bit…
May 10, 2006
Working on a project by yourself can be fun, exciting and surprisingly efficient. After all there are no communication problems between people. You know what the vision is for the game. You know the motivations of everyone involved and what they're currently thinking.
I don't think I realized h…
I don't think I realized h…
May 09, 2006
Well my project has been going well but it's mostly boring art stuff now and nothing exciting on the coding front to talk about.
I did notice some texture weirdness going on that wasn't happening a month or so ago so I decided to finally try and track that down. This is when source control is abs…
I did notice some texture weirdness going on that wasn't happening a month or so ago so I decided to finally try and track that down. This is when source control is abs…
May 06, 2006
This morning I finally got around to opening a small business account at my bank. Luckily for me I'm such a valued customer that it was all free to set up and doesn't have any annoying things like a minimum balance and such. My company does seem far more real now that I have money in a business a…
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