Bug of the week , funny moments...

I haven't seen any indie blog nor any other kind of blog that publish some of the most interesting bugs while developing , probably is it not so nice to show the mistakes but sometimes I think showing some of them bring some joy and fun while developing.

This time I just want to show some of those funny moments from last night, also as a plus the first bug gave me some new ideas, learning from previous mistakes one can make do better everyday. Like the following image, the garbage on the right is a wrong texture applied to another character, and when I saw that thing moving gave me an idea of a new character , I will keep it as a secret until the final draw is ready but was fun to see.

After replacing and fixing the correct texture I got this...

Well, now it looks better, a group of trolls coming, but hmm... colors and patterns are not good, I was so sleepy that it took me over half an hour to fix the issue, it was only a DXT compression setting and a key color that shouldn't be using, I usually do not compress textures since my animation framework can replace colors and it needs to have precise numbers to change them to do a palette replacement, well spent too much last night fixing trivial bugs, but finally today I got this image.

Finally! it is working as expected! and I got crushed over and over tonight while trying to win the level , those trolls are overpowered now, I am trying to balance the gameplay and have fun mixing the building blocks of the game and it takes time to balance it well, but I am pretty happy to lose over and over now, it is fun! better than the previous puzzle mode.

A bug that is so deadly that can kill you...

A short story that I wouldn't want anyone else to live. Yesterday I was creating new animations with the Mystic Framework and found a small bug that I wanted to fix, nothing  important but was related to a UI glitch of the animation editor, so I decided to put some breakpoints and find the culprid class that created that annoying glitch and suddenly Visual Studio showed an error telling me that the source code is not matching the current build, ok I said , I will stop and rebuild so I can continue debugging, soon after it stopped around 2000+ errors popped up on the screen. This doesn't looks good, anyway, I am tired now so the best way is to quit and reload, and probably no errors will show up since I haven't closed VS for the last 3 days, well after loading the application to my surprise surprise! errors were still there, and after trying to figure out what was going on, I noticed that magically nearly 1.5 megabytes of code was gone from many classes, I don't really know how is that possible but many files were affected and the code was gone, nowhere to be found, only being able to see some code that maybe I wrote about a year ago and few pieces of code here and there was there!, I went from very angry to very sad in a second of my life.

Not all is lost, luckily, I made some periodic backups, I used to have a backup utility but it stopped working long ago, but didn't care to find a new one because I wanted to keep coding, so I only did the minimum and keep doing manual backups and zip the files, saddly the most recent back was made about 15 days ago, but not all is lost, keeping a log file in another place with the tasks I made since I started allowed me to find what I did, and restoring the old files plus using some code that I was able to salvage restored maybe 98% of the missing code or even a little bit more, and I only had to spend 2 hours more verifying that the code worked with minimum patching since the code was quite fresh in my mind I could easily fix it.

Now, I am a little bit worried that this may happen again, about 4 to 5 months ago something similar happened but was not serious just a few lines of code was lost, but this time it was almost everything I worked on the in the past 6 months or maybe more, so my weekend task is going to be "find a good backup utility", I haven't been able to find yet an "incremental" backup tool with zip capabilities so I don't get my hd full of backups, I saw a few ones here and there but most of those tools just synchronize files without compression, and without scheduler, I don't need a 5 minute backup tool, just once a day is more than enough so I can backup different folders and compress the new output, if none are available , something I doubt, I may have to write one but I don't want to spend time on it since I prefer to keep doing testing and fixing some other bugs in game as well as adding more gameplay features.

The bug in VS happened on all the form files I was using, I have one main form but its code is divided into several files for readability, so at some point of time VS may have gotten confused and broke in pieces and taking my code with it. Hope this thing doesn't happen to anyone else in the future.

Killing bugs!

I've been having small pixel errors in the shader while converting colors, and this piece of code fixed it finally, took me a few weeks to find this bug, still not quite sure why my values went over the limits but the commented code didn't do it before.

h += 360 * (-floor(h / 360.0));    // convert to absolute 0 to 360 degrees
//if( h < 0 ) {
//    h += 360;
//}
//if (h > 360) {
//    h -= 360;   
//}

pretty happy that I was able to find the issue and fix it in 10 minutes while testing the shader editor, I didn't see that bug until I used the real time capabilities to get instant feedback, trying to do the same in Visual Studio and XNA directly in HLSL is very complicated since I am not an expert in shaders yet and takes forever to see something on-screen.

Happy holidays and prosperous new year!

Wish you happy holidays and Prosperous new year, it has been a very busy year with lots of new ideas to test and a lot more work than I was expecting, but finally it is given good results.

I just uploaded a simple video showing up spring vertex functionality and how secondary motion can be achieved easily and it also interacts with cloth fabric vertices at the same time. Most probably the framwork will be ready for prime time by the end of January, and expecting to develop all the juicy stuff for the game after, it was very tedious to animate and adjust parameters while programming but the new framework will make that a thing of the past.

Summer is blazing hot this year and to make the heat even higher some updated pics

Just a few snaps of the editor, the Mystic Framework will power Elem3ntz! game animations, and so far it is working extremelly well, with bones, vertex animation, cloth simulator and other small tricks under the hood.

Mystic Editor

A snap of the work in progress 2D editor, not just simple bones can be added but way more things that I will show up later in a video once I finish the saving/loading code, which will take a few more days to finish. And after that, add the fluid livelike 2d animations into Elem3ntz! game.

This is the wireframe view, basically it works like a 3D tool but designed with specific tools for 2D and each parameter can be independently animated, something I couldn't find in any free solution which is a must for very complex animations. Also includes a 2d scene animator editor for very much complex animation clips.

Finally weekend!
I can share a picture of the gameboard now. Still element icons are work in progress.

Enjoy!

Another week gone and something more to share
This is another of the in game playable characters, the witch, still work in progress

Productive week and unknown solutions...

It has been a very productive week so far, struggled trying to make a XNA window fit a windows form, so far I have been unsuccessfull to accomplish that task so I had to load demo window and base on it remove all the unnecessary code and work on the cut scene/background editor, spent 3 days trying to fit the XNA window but after that took me like 3 more days to finish the skeleton and player of my animations, for just a week of work I think the output is pretty decent. Stll no timeline editor like any video editor since I couldn't find any free control for that yet, don't want to waste too much time developing it now. Here is an screenshot of the WIP editor.

Hope this will accelerate the animation process of the cut scenes and sprites in the game. Maybe will post a video of it running XNA animations in realtime while editing, it imports different spritesheets, same as the ones used for the game so I don't have a double work to do, just use the in game player of the editor saving a lot of space and time. Still need to add the audio track so the editor can be used for any other project in the future as well include effects like bloom, motion blur , etc... but that is planned for another game.

Progress and small teaser

Great progress has been made in the last couple of weeks, 40% of the AI has been completed and some progress on the effects and game mechanic. Just a teaser picture of the upcoming game Elem3ntz! below...

Elem3ntz! is a puzzle game where you combine different elements to attack the other player, more details soon.

And of course! this is an Indie game and I hope people to enjoy it!

New game in progress update

Just a quick update...
The new game is moving slow but smooth, as an update starting 2012 I have something to share, more to come as soon as the UI is polished and gameplay refined, still in very alpha state but just a quick screenshot of the game title...

Hope everyone enjoyed the new year holidays!

Slow updates...

Been very busy the past few months, and development stopped a little bit, but still having some improvements here and there. I will release this game a little bit late since I just started preparing some other project for next year, but still this will be finished at some point of time. I am almost at the same start date as when I started a year ago this project, and I found myself with new ideas and a more enjoyable playing experience in a very different way, so I will post some pictures later when I have them ready. At least I will post some updates every 2 months.

A new in-game picture

Just a quick glance of the updated graphics of Zombie Crusade for XBOX360.

Still work in progress, it has been a very busy week, but graphics are now getting to the level I wanted to have for this game., more to come up soon....like magic effects and better illumination

Few updates

After  the contest entry, i found myself with some free time to really upgrade the graphics so just made a few minor changes and also in the shading model, instead of just using a simple round shade.
Illumination is also being added to the game so a more pleasant image is shown.

Still lot more to do... but just a start.