dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. I'd say it was a pretty good one here. Nice weather. Nice dinners. A trip to the zoo. And a night where we were able to socialize with grown-ups. Yay!

Back in dev land, I found myself thinking of the today's title, a quote from the Postman, when prepping today's devlog. NEO Scavenger desktop version is getting better everyday.

Hey Folks! After nearly 2 days of banging my head against this map rendering issue, it appears to be fixed!

I think I basically had to try everything before I was able to get a hold of this bug. Rewriting image loaders, walking the code, debug output, wildly trying different inputs and outputs. Eventually, disabling huge swaths of the map renderer pointed me in the right direction. Because as it turned out, rendering one part of the map was short-circuiting the rendering of the rest.

Hey Folks! Not much work done today, as it was spent more on administrative type tasks. However, one of the larger ones involved the overall vision of the space prototype.

Happy Fourth of July, Folks! It's officially mock warzone here in the States, with explosions both near and far. I wonder how many actual gun battles are happening right now because nobody would notice?

Since we have a vacation coming up, I decided to work through this holiday and see if I could make headway on the hex rendering issue. Short version: I did not.

Hey Folks! Been a bit of a rough day, as I wrestle with Asset caching in the engine in order to load assets.

Pretty much most of the day was spent trying and failing to get the game loading bitmaps into mod containers. In the PC version, the engine loads each mod into a separate data container, so when the game requests an asset by ID, it first checks which mod to get it from, then loads it from there.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. Ours was a little bittersweet as we watched Canada Day festivities on CBC live from afar. We miss our other home at times like these. I also suited up for vacuuming the 100+ year old crawlspace beneath our house. Darkness, cramped and hard to reach spaces, awkward equipment, and limited breathing. I imagine submarine mechanic work is worse, but not by much.

Hey Folks! Work continues on completing our first test plot. And Michael's air traffic control (ATC) script is ready!

When we left off yesterday, we could reach our quarry in the bartender snitch plot. But we weren't able to do anything once we got there. So today was mostly about adding the means to wrap-up that plot by telling a law enforcement officer (LEO) on the same station about the target. And as usual, bugs were discovered along the way :)

Hey Folks! Another round of bug fixes and stability improvements today, followed by a near successful plot run!

Hey Folks! Still discovering a fair number of bugs as I test this plot functionality.

One of the first bugs found was when I returned to the test mode without any planets loaded. Since that only has one chargen station loaded, and social contacts was explicitly trying to avoid that station when spawning new people, I ran into a null pointer bug.

Hey Folks! A pretty wide range of coding work today, as I tackled a series of smaller tasks that should hopefully add-up to more stability, speed, and easier game testing.

Earlier in the day, work mostly involved fixing bugs. I set the docking range to 4000km so I could dock more easily to test plots, started a new game, and immediately hit a few bugs. First, I had to add code to prevent new social contacts from spawning in-station with me while I did character creation. Since, basically, they'd be destroyed as soon as I finished :)