“Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.” - Jawaharlal Nehru
In the hectic switch over to the new networking layer, I missed one small detail. Every packet of data sent wasn’t being cleaned up properly. 100 bytes isn’t that much data alone but at a rate of about 30 times a second for many seconds, it adds up. Hey, at least it was caught now and not 3 weeks after release, give me some credit for that…
Another victory was finally figuring out what was causing the game to crash on about 10% of player’s computers due to a shadow setting some graphic drivers on some NVidia 6 and 7 series cards didn’t approve of. Many other bugs were fixed last week, more than I thought now that I look at the changes, nice!
This is a big week. Lots to do, little time, lots of pressure, little beef jerky left.
Last week I spent a lot of time reproducing bugs, and trying to help figure out how to fix them. I also spent a day tuning the kart physics, and by adding a point on the bottom of the karts and tweaking a few suspension values was able to pretty much eliminate an annoying tendency the karts used to have of spinning around 180 degrees on hard landings. I also conjured up some new screenshots to put on our media page, and started cataloging some possible Zero Gear achievements and icon designs.
This week I will be doing everything I can to facilitate getting another build out, and hopefully along with it - opening up the beta further.
Last week I fixed around 1,000,000 bugs in Zero Gear, give or take a few. These included dead bots, over-active bots, sounds not playing, sounds still playing, GUI bugs, weapon bugs, spawn point bugs, camera bugs and more. We massaged more things like soccer ball mass, bunny hopping, and kart physics. I also added an entirely new weapon to the game, the Spring! With this weapon you can spring forward to gain on a rival, avoid obstacles, or make a shortcut. You can also “drop” use the weapon to spring straight up (especially useful in tag when someone is barreling towards you).
Last week’s SVN log:
