Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Gateway

Crash analysis

Well, the crash I thought was gone wasn’t that gone… Took me a bit to track it down, but finally I got it down… At first, it seemed to be a memory corruption somewhere, but it only manifested itself on the Mac build. Activating memory guard and other helper debugging tools didn’t show any memory […]

Static analysis

I just found a neat tool on XCode, a static analysis tool, which provides me a list of potential problems in the code (null pointers, unused code paths, etc), so I’m cleaning up the code to address these issues… There’s a lot of “false positives” (well, they aren’t exactly false positives, the problems might exist […]

Bug fixing: Mac Edition

Still working on finishing the Mac port… I found some performance issues, and after a lot of work I figured the problem is mainly the ambient occlusion. The Mac I’m using for testing is an i3 with a Radeon 5670 with 512Mb of RAM, so it’s not totally a surprise it performs terribly when I […]

Finally fixed!

This was a tough one to track… Ended up using GL Monitor to list all the calls and looking at them in detail, trying to figure out what was happening there… The problem was the redundant texture switch system. To minimize texture changes, before I set a texture I see if that texture is already […]

Weird bug…

Today I was trying to finalize the Mac version so I could send it to the UI artist, and I found a really weird bug… So, sometimes the ship landing looks like this: So, first guess: shader… But this only happens on the Mac build, it works fine on the Linux and Windows build… Still, […]

Finished the trailer!

Now all that remains is to decide on when/how to launch it… The idea was to do it ASAP, but now I’m thinking if it’s smart, since all my development plans are a bit up in the wind… Anyway, back to map editing… Now listening to “Heaven Still Burns” by “Absentia” Link of the Day: […]

Still trailering…

So this is what I’m staring at for the last 3 hours… This sort of web video production services app is so slow, and my computer, while not AMAZING, it’s quite good… It takes forever to adjust stuff to the audio… Tomorrow I’ll do a final render on this, hopefully, and then I have to […]

Back to Premiere

So, as I said, I received the amazing music for the trailer, so now it’s time to adjust the timings, etc. Problem with that is that my Premiere is acting a bit wonky… Before I just pressed “play” and I could see a segment to make small adjustments… But now, I press play, it takes […]

Working the maps…

Today I’m mostly working on the game maps, adding the new props the artist has provided, and fixing some minor issues related to the latest updates on the game… I’m still working on finding a new job, so not much time to develop the game (even it might help me land a job)… Today I’m […]

Savegames done!

Finally… Took me way longer than I wanted, but given the circumstances, it was the possible timeline… And I can even go from binary to XML, which is good for hacking for tests… In the meantime, the artist finished the new version of the table assets, so I’m going to place that in the game, […]