Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Monthly Archives: September 2015

Live from the Netherlands!

Or sort of… I came to the Netherlands to finish some work for my previous employer, just tying loose ends, so I don’t have much time during this week to work on the game… Still, I’ve been making some progress, and most of the stuff called out on the Game Dev Camp are fixed and/or […]

More bug tracking…

Busy squashing bugs… Most of them are quite small stuff that was more nuisances than actual bugs, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve found some “big” stuff. One of these was some conditions where the story planets couldn’t be generated properly, which meant the game would get stuck in the generation phase… That […]

Fixed it!

So the problem ended up being the fact that the z-buffer associated with the render target wasn’t the same size, so it got clamped… It still smells of driver bug in fact, since depth testing, writing, etc, was turned off, but it was more or less simple to fix: just create a 1024×1024 depth buffer […]

Driver woes?

I think the problem I’m having is driver related… Or at least this driver is a bit more strict than normals and I’m using OpenGL wrong… So, the game window is 1600×900 (when I’m developing, you can choose when playing). When I use 1024×1024 SSAO, you get the problem below: When I use a 256×256 […]

More work…

I’ve been away for a few days… During that time, I sorted some of the issues from my Game Dev Camp, but mostly I spent my (very little) time trying to figure out a graphical bug in the game. It only happens on OpenGL on my laptop, but it’s still super annoying: You see that […]

Day 4: Light!

Well, it seems the bug is almost fixed… As I suspected, it was a buffer overflow somewhere, but the place was unlikely: the particle system… In particular, this was the offending piece of code: if (!_vb) { _vb=create_vertex_buffer((int32_t)(_particles.size()+PSBUFFER)*4); _ib=create_index_buffer((int32_t)(_particles.size()+PSBUFFER)*6); _allocated=(int32_t)_particles.size()+PSBUFFER; } else { // Check if they have space if ((size_t)_allocated<_particles.size()) { size_t n_part=_allocated*2; // […]

Day 2: Still no luck

No real update for today… Spent about 3 hours trying to figure out where the heap corruption is happening, with very little success… The only thing I’m sure is that this must be OpenGL-code related, since it doesn’t happen in D3D (or if it happens it’s later)… I can consistently trigger this in OpenGL, but […]

Ruined day…

As the title indicates, this was a completely wasted day… Was going to fix more stuff from the feedback list, but instead got a heap corruption bug somewhere that I couldn’t manage to fix… A heap corruption bug happens when you write to a position that was already released (or out of bounds)… Problem is […]

New initial area

So today I finished the new and improved initial area, hopefully players will have a better sense of “direction” with this one and will provide a good and entertaining introduction to the game… Still have a ton of stuff to add based on the feedback received, most of it quite simple, albeit time consuming… Some […]