Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Yearly Archives: 2015

Way more bugs than expected…

The “escort” mission was full of them, some due to the multithreading, others due the actual logic of the system (for example, the player could leave without the person being escorted)… Other than that, it was just standard debugging… Still found some places where I’m using the old brains, instead of the script-based AIs, so […]

More bug fixing…

As the title indicates, some more work on bugs, mainly things related to the multithreaded area generation… Also improved the look on the vertical faces of the ice: Just got some more bugs on my list, and tests to be done on the random missions (some of them might have been broken by the multithreaded […]

Behind the scenes: bug-fixing

Not much to talk about today (at least nothing interesting)… It was mainly a bug-tracking/killing day… Some issues with the management of missions (which would sometimes cause for duplicate missions to show up), plus the sneaky ninja that wouldn’t cross the area boundary (which sucks!) and some other small stuff… I expect tomorrow I’ll be […]

Silly bugs…

Found another bug with the game related to the new multithreading system: sometimes, at a certain point in the game, ninjas spawn to chase the player. Before, when the player changed area, the ninja would spawn again, but now they don’t, because they haven’t been destroyed (the previous area is still in RAM). I’ve adjusted […]

Task underestimation

Scheduling and task management is something I could never do just right, I always tend to underestimate the effort, even if I multiply the times by two or even three… I probably think I’m smarter than I actually am! Anyway, today was one of those tasks… I thought that reviewing the scanner effect would take […]

Optimization: Shader Cache

The shader system on “Cantrip” has some sophistication to it, and part of it is the fact that it generates the specific necessary shaders from a uber-shader (a big shader full of conditions) and a render environment that trims that uber-shader to smaller ones, depending on need… The problem with this approach is that everytime […]

Polishing the caves…

Working on the caves, I found a lot of small bugs… First, something I should have noticed before, but it really becomes apparent when you have no light: explosions have a light and that light was not being computed properly: It ended up just being a bad setup of the structures for lighting, took me […]

Polished the asteroid…

Not much to do here, to be honest… It’s an asteroid… First I remade the starfield… That had some issues, because I wanted to replace the points with something more pixelated: Because of the way I had a flag defined, it conflicted with another one, so I had some weird effects while trying to make […]

Polishing the desert…

Not much to do here, the desert was rather good looking already and there’s not much you can add to a desert without making it look less desert-like… Anyway, had to fix a lot of bugs related to the oasis generation (it was linked to the lake generation, which was removed when I built a […]

Done with the ice planet!

Today was a good day, finished the ice planet polish! It also means I managed to make the cube maps work on OpenGL (had a nasty seam on the skybox until I found that I had to do glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_SEAMLESS) to get seamless cube maps on OpenGL)… So, we got snow, grass, and reflective ice, and […]