Weekly Development Update #5

This one is going to have some holes in it, but this was ultimately a good week. Lessons learned, progress made, etc and so forth. Without further ado:

Wednesday August 18^th

First time this week I’ve had a chance to work on SPX, but I FINALLY fixed my issue… turns out that I was creating my ogre window and updating it in different threads, which screws things up. I also got my precompiled headers set up, DRASTICALLY shortening compile times. I am a happy man.

Friday August 20^th

Didn’t get into any code today, but I am working on a detailed development plan that I can follow for the next week or so. I’ve been thrown off track by work commitments and that godawful bug I was struggling with, but now it’s time to get moving again. My main priorities, going forward, will be to rewrite the rendering, input, and camera systems, in that order, to achieve feature parity with what I had before the engine port. Afterwards, I’ll begin focusing on making a game prototype.

Saturday August 21^st

Started trying to implement graphics. Most of my time was spent on the architecture for managing graphics assets. Nothing to show… yet.

Sunday August 22^nd

Eureka! Finally have something to show! Temporary ship graphics, and everything is working again!

Okay, so apparently I’m an idiot.

In the process of switching to Ogre, I made a few game architecture changes without testing them in order to adapt to Ogre’s way of doing things. All this time, I was assuming that the actual game was still intact under everything, but between getting the client and server threaded and altering how the frame-to-frame updates were being done, I cocked everything up. The server was quitting because the client thread hadn’t had time to start running yet, and none of the game objects were updating because the change to the updating cycle meant that the "currentFrameTime" wasn’t being calculated anymore. Both of these were one-line fixes, but I spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out if I screwed up the game OR screw up on the Ogre port, when I could have focused on tracking these bugs down.

Lesson learned: in any large overhaul, do whatever changes you can without breaking the system FIRST so that they can be tested, THEN start breaking things.

At any rate, I can start moving on to other aspects of the port. Once input and camera control are back in, it’s over and done with, and I’ll be able to start working on turning it into an actual game!