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Week of April 28, 2013

#1
Sunday, April 28, 2013

Summary

Ahh!! Jeez. Almost forgot to write the dev log in all this excitement...but I guess you could already tell that...

LTP was released.

Need I give you any more dev log than that??? :D

So far, there's been less technical pain than I anticipated. I'm sure the worst is yet to come, but I'm just glad we're not seeing some massive, widespread issue with GPU compatibility or something like that. So..I guess I would call it a success?? I really need to wait and see if people are actually able to have "fun" with it. That's the real test!

I hope some of you start posting your progress in the "Your Story" section...use that F1 (screenshot) key!!! I really want to read/follow your progress and see what kind of challenges you face, your thoughts on various aspects, etc. I need some you LTP people to write your own dev logs that I can read :geek:

PS ~ I have finally decided to stop tagging logistical stuff as "business"...that just doesn't make sense. Instead I will tag it as "logistics." Today, the "logistics" was basically all editing & rendering the video! Took quite a while, because it was a long one and more well thought-out than usual...but I hope it helped at least a few people :)

Hour Tally

Coding: 0.51
Internet: 5.31
Logistics: 5.85
Testing: 2.77
Total Logged Time: 14.44
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Week of April 28, 2013

#2
Monday, April 29, 2013

Summary

Not too much "dev" to talk about today :) I figured it was about time to treat myself to some sleep...and treat I did!!! Truly a glorious thing, that sleep.

Basically just trolled the forums for the rest of the day, helping with what bugs I could help with, investigating others and preparing for "the great bugfix," which will begin...tomorrow? I guess.

I'm a little bit sad that I didn't have any extra time this month to push out new content between the prototype and the update, as I wanted them to be distinct - but with only one day separating them, I'm afraid I'm going to have to skimp a bit on tomorrow's update. Ahh well.

PS ~ I'm still not seeing enough in the "Your Story" section... :evil:

Hour Tally

Coding: 0.17
Internet: 10.29
Testing: 0.08
Total Logged Time: 10.54
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Week of April 28, 2013

#3
Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Summary

Once again, spent a whole lot of the day lurking on the forums and reading about peoples' problems and suggestions concerning LTP. Also put out an underwhelming monthly update :P But hey, it happens, especially right after a big release...!

I did get to spend some time coding today, and have fixed a few issues already. But my primary focus for the next version is improving stability and crash reporting capabilities. Right now we're seeing a lot of hard crashes, which leaves the player very unhappy and me equally unhappy, because I garner no information from these. I'm working on improving the reports of the LT engine to allow easier diagnosis of these crashes. I've got the "soft" crashes under control - the ones that used to give a message box will now write out a small windows dump file, which can then be sent to me and I can use it to pretty handily check out what happened. But hard crashes still have me a little befuddled. Although I can override the signal handlers in the program to implement my own behavior on hard crashes, I still have not managed to get a valid stack backtrace (the main critical piece of debugging information) from these situations. I'm currently trying to investigate this, unfortunately, it is one of those dark corners of coding into which not that many people venture :(

Anyway, I'm going to take another half-day off (I kind of count half of today as a day off since I was just perusing the forums), and am probably going to fire up Morrowind or Skyrim here in a minute. Sadly Steam screwed me over and lost my save data...looks like I may never complete that Morrowind final quest -.- Sad times. But I'm sure I'll still manage to have some fun :)

And then? Well..it's May!!! I'm really excited for May. I'm happy to be off the leash of a time deadline - at least for a while - and am looking forward to doing some *really* serious thinking about the architecture of this game. You've seen what I can do in terms of what most games have already done - I can make a basic dogfighter. Cool. But now...what about the stuff that most games don't do? A really comprehensive universe simulation with intelligent AI? Deep interactions with that AI? Deep faction mechanics? I'm super excited to start laying out plans for all of this stuff. It's going to be a monumental, but also monumentally fun task :D

Hour Tally

Coding: 1.51
Internet: 11.64
Testing: 0.41
Total Logged Time: 13.56
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Week of April 28, 2013

#4
Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Summary

Although I took a portion of the day off again, I did start preparing for the LTP bugfixing. As I mentioned before, my primary focus at the moment is on those crashes. Crashing is just not acceptable! Today I went over almost all of the code that I suspected of crashability with a very fine-toothed comb. Although I only found one or two "concrete" suspects, I made a lot of cautionary changes elsewhere. While I'm definitely not going to be able to fix the crashes all at once, I would like to convert as many of the hard crashes as possible into soft crashes. As I mentioned yesterday, I've now got error dump generation for soft crashes in place, which is going to make debugging soft crashes significantly easier. Hard crashes are still a problem.

In general, I have a few strategies for generating soft crashes. Almost all of them revolve around ensuring that a resource exists before trying to access it. Doing so allows the engine to generate an error in the case that the code attempts to access a resource that does not exist. This accounts for a majority of the soft crashes that I'm currently seeing, and I suspect that it also accounts for about 90% of the hard crashes. The code that I write nowadays is a lot safer than the code I used to write (because I am indeed getting better at it as LT progresses). I'm trying to revisit a lot of the old code and replace unsafe memory constructs with constructs that can detect a problem before it occurs.

Unfortunately, I was in such a coding frenzy in April - trying to do as much as I could before the release of LTP - that I definitely cut some corners with respect to code quality. I'm absolutely certain that there are some unification/cleanliness opportunities that I have missed. Now that I have some time to breath, I need to invest the time in re-thinking some of the hasty decisions I made last month. Going forward, as more and more features find their way into LT, it's only going to become more and more critical to simplify and unify, to make sure that this project does not exceed the scope of my abilities. I look forward to the challenge :)

PS ~ I didn't end up playing any TES games today, which was very sad...but I was so upset after seeing that Steam lost my Morrowind savegame where I had almost beaten the game, that I just quit. I don't want to play Skyrim or Oblivion..I just want to be the Nerevarine for once :cry: Instead I watched a show about a guy who solves crimes with math, very nice 8-)

PPS ~ "Logistics" today was going out in search of a nice desk and chair. I'm trying to get my home office set up to prepare for "the long haul." Sadly I only managed to find a chair, not a good desk.

Hour Tally

Coding: 2.29
Internet: 6.99
Logistics: 1.72
Testing: 0.12
Total Logged Time: 11.13
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Week of April 28, 2013

#5
Thursday, May 2, 2013

Summary

Time to get back in gear! :D

It's going to be a bit of an awkward month, since I'm going to try to find a balance between pressing forward with new LT content and wrapping up the issues with LTP...but hopefully I will be able to manage.

Today I rolled through a good many of the major "bugs" on the list, as you can see from the green. Naturally, I took care of the easier ones first...the remaining ones all require a bit more thought. Perhaps one of the most critical flaws that I'm trying to attack right now is the way that aiming is tied to the ship's forward cone. For those that have tried piloting the larger ships in LTP, you know that this is a serious handicap that needs to be addressed. Although we will have automation of ship turrets in the future, that doesn't preclude the necessity of having decent manual firing capabilities on ships that can't turn quickly. I hope to have this one solved tonight/tomorrow, as it will really increase the playability of the game.

But other than working on LTP issues, I started to press forward with my concepts of LT universe generation. I did have a few nice insights today that allowed me to simplify my ideas. The problem is now cast purely in terms of evaluating a field...and I'm sure no one is surprised by that :D Although it might be a bit too optimistic, I am hoping to finish universe generation this month, including all preliminary content in the universe - everything you've seen in LTP, plus planets, moons, real stations, jump gates, and wormholes. I think it's the right call to produce the universe before stepping too deep into the simulation of it. Not to mention that I am still very scared of the universe simulation task, as I know it will be the most challenging part of the dev process, so I should gain as much experience and insight as possible before starting.

Hour Tally

Coding: 3.72
Internet: 4.48
Testing: 1.98
Thinking: 1.26
Total Logged Time: 11.43
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Week of April 28, 2013

#6
Friday, May 3, 2013

Summary

I spent pretty much the whole day on the decoupling-ship-firing-angle-from-spatial-orientation problem. I'm almost finished!

It's a surprisingly tough problem to crack, for a number of reasons. The biggest issue that I have right now is getting the flight control to feel as responsive / tactile as the old system was for fighters. When you're piloting a fighter, your view angle and ship orientation should pretty much line up, unless you've engaged free mode / turret mode (whatever you want to call it). A fighter can maneuver quickly enough to orient itself with the view angle for any reasonable sensitivity settings. Still, introducing an extra layer between the camera and the ship creates problems with responsiveness, as you might expect. I still want piloting a fighter to feel "tight" like it does in LTP. On the other hand, piloting a destroyer still needs to be manageable, unlike in LTP. The latter part is solved: the new flight system makes it wayyy better to pilot a big ship, and allows you to target and fire upon enemies in any direction with equal ease. But piloting a fighter still doesn't feel quite right.

All I really need to do is keep playing with the math for long enough, and I'm sure I'll get it to work out eventually. I'm excited about this improvement, though, as it's really a huge boost to the enjoyability of flying large ships! :D I actually might try flying something larger than a fighter now!

Hour Tally

Coding: 4.51
Internet: 5.46
Testing: 2.10
Thinking: 1.61
Total Logged Time: 13.68

Comments on the new flight controls
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Week of April 28, 2013

#7
Saturday, May 4, 2013

Summary

Again, spent all day on flight controls. This time, I feel like I really made progress!!

Fighter controls are feeling pretty darn good, and cap controls are feeling way better at the same time!!! There are still a few bugs I need to hammer out in fighter flight control - for some reason, it's not quite as smooth as I remember - but for now, I'm really happy with this development :) Manageable cap ship control is going to be a new era for LT!

Get ready to pilot your megaship in style ;)

Hour Tally

Coding: 2.32
Internet: 2.83
Testing: 1.49
Total Logged Time: 6.64

Comments on the new flight controls
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Week of April 28, 2013

#8
Week Summary

General Sentiment

Obviously a very memorable week with the release of LTP :) After the release, I spent most of my time reading and responding to LTP-related stuff. Also, I'll admit...I slept a lot this week. Last month may have burned me a little more than I realized...but it's over now, and I think my sleep debt has been repaid!

Major Accomplishments
  • RELEASED LTP!!!
  • Lots of small-to-medium-sized bugfixes for next version of LTP (consult bug list for details)
  • Decoupled view angle from ship orientation, allowing for greater aiming capability, especially with large ships
Combined Hour Tally

Coding: 15.03
Internet: 47.00
Logistics: 7.57
Testing: 8.96
Thinking: 2.87
Total Logged Time: 81.42
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford

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