The crashes and memory errors made it impossible for me to test to see if the AI was building starbases, so my main priority this week was debugging the crashes and memory errors. I did some multi-tasking and worked on the fleets in a clean copy of the project while running the game in the AI test mode and waiting for it to crash, but more on that later. At first, I tried using BoundsChecker, which works well for memory and resource leaks, but doesn't really help much for heap errors, w...

Scott finished the rest of the starbase graphics, so I was able to get them all into the game. We have a different graphic for each of the four kinds of starbases that you can build: military, economy, culture, and resource starbases. (If we manage to fit asteroid mining in, it will use the resource starbase gfx). I also tweaked some of the behavior of the starbase build/update screen. I changed it to list the number of installed modules rather than the number of available modules, as it's...

This was a short week because of the holiday weekend, but I only had one main feature to get done for the week: starbases. I'm using temporary graphics for the starbases until the art team has the models ready on Monday, but I have the interface all hooked up. I don't know if starbases will be in the next build of beta 2, though, since the starbase bonuses affect a lot of calculations and most of them are not using the starbase bonuses at the moment. Terror stars are not in and will not be...

You'll remember from last week's blog that I was working on a new algorthim to pick the starting planets for the major civilization to improve the loading time. I believe that I have found a good solution. I started a game with a gigantic galaxy using the old code and it took 2.68s to pick planets for 10 major races, which was surprisingly fast as the shortest time from my tests last week was at least 4 seconds for a gigantic galaxy, so it must have made a lot of good random rolls. Then I...

Aside from working on fixing some of the more glaring bugs in beta 2, I've been working on optimizing the loading time for new games. According to our profiling code, it was taking 20-30 seconds to load a small galaxy. This, of course, was insane, and besides being annoying was nickeling and diming our development time. If it takes 30 seconds just to get into a game to test something, and you have to keep starting new games, that starts adding up. The first thing that I fixed was a fu...

Like my teammates, I took some time to look back at what we've done since the last beta, and we have accomplished a lot. There are a ton of fixes, and a lot of screens. And the Gal Civ team is moved into the new office! It's beautiful, and very comfortable. We have a few technical difficulties created by having most of the equipment and people still at the old office, but we managed to get the beta up today anyway. We particularly put a lot of effort into the Custom Race screen and th...

Zoomba happened to mention Geek 2 Geek in the #joeuser chat room on irc.stardock.com earlier today, so I went there and filled out a profile. A few of us in #joeuser have said that there really needs to be a way for geeks to find other geeks. I've even discussed starting up my own service, since I'm frustrated with the ones that I've been using that are more general. Starting my own service, however, would take up time that I just don't have, and most geeks are extremely busy people. So ...

There have been quite a few times when I have been talking with a group of people and somehow the conversation will turn towards "ghost stories." Every time, there was always someone who had an experience for which they could not find a mundane explanation. I myself have had a few unusual experiences. Inevitably, there are skeptics in the group who, even given the absence of any other reasonable causes, will claim that the person telling the story must have been mistaken. However, the sk...

My grandfather, my mother's father, died this past Saturday from acute respitory failure. He had emphysema, and we'd known for months that he could have died at any time. Even so, I wasn't expecting him to die last weekend. I'd been planning on going over to their house on Sunday as I normally do, to bring him and my grandmother Holy Communion. He died around 12:30 Saturday morning, and my mother called me as soon as they called her. I was glad that she called me. Somehow, sleep makes i...

Speed dating is a rather cool concept. It was invented for people who are serious about meeting people but they don't have a lot of time or inclination to go bar hopping or clubbing. The events take place at a restaurant or club, and the hosts match you up with 8 other people for 8 minutes (it varies depending on who is running it, but this is the second time I've gone to an 8 Minute Dating Event). You have 8 minutes to chat with someone, and you meet 8 different people. There's an interm...

The best thing about working on Gal Civ 2 is that this time around, I have the advantage of more experience coding computer games. I think that any coder will agree with me that (in general) the more code that you write, the better code you write. You learn how to do things better, faster, and cleaner. Besides working on screens this week, I've fixed some bugs. I fixed the edge scrolling bug, which turned out to be caused by an uninitialized variable, as opposed to an error in the mo...

Well, it looks like I haven't posted a dev journal entry since April 15th. Sorry about that, guys! As you probably know, the next phase of the GC2 beta will focus on the user interface. That means that we have to get a lot of the screens in, which is now pretty easy thanks to DesktopX. However, the sheer number of them means that it's time consuming. Anyway, here's what I've been working on since the last time I posted a dev journal. At first, I was waiting for the artists to get some...

It's promising to be an absolutely gorgeous weekend here in Michigan, so please be patient if you post something on the forums and no one from Stardock responds until Monday. I personally plan to get as much stuff done in my yard and the outside of my house as possible this weekend. I'm only going to cover what I did this week because before that you have the release notes from the various builds that went up to get an idea of what we were doing, and I want to go enjoy my weekend. It...

Well, I was going to have screenshots this week of the screens that I worked on. I forgot about making screenshots until after I'd already updated my code from the server, and then I discovered that I needed a new library that was just added this week to the server. Well, the server says that library isn't there. So I can't compile my code again until I get that library, and that means I can't run GC2 again until I get that library. Which means no screenshots tonight. I'll try to remember to edi...

I worked on the save game wnd this week, modifying the graphics from the options wnd. It needs some tweaking, graphically, but I think that all the code it needs is in, and I was able to test to make sure that I could load a saved game. I'm not sure how well it will work if you do it from within a game, or for that matter, how starting a new game from within a game works. I did some minimal testing on this mostly to make sure that it wouldn't crash, but the weirdness that resulted may hav...