Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 26/314 (1/26/12)
Up debugging flying houses this morning. In the old engine, it was flying Dwarvs.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 25/314 (1/25/12)
Last night, I poked some more player housing into the map, but took half of it back out this morning (leaving myself with a floating building of dubious provenance to clean up tonight). It wasn't a terrible idea, but it didn't work for me... I might be internalizing the map--it's joining the long list of versions, lost to time, which now exist only in my mind, but which can each be separated by design features which render them distinctly different.

I want a setting which is fantastic when viewed through a macro lens, but up close is very, very real, where majik is not used to cover the cracks. There's majik, it's not uncommon, but when it rains, boots still get muddy.

I've been doing an enormous amount of research into the Old School Revival movement, trying to answer some questions I have about what exactly it is about the older D&D settings and culture I find so imaginatively stimulating, and why more modern, state-of-the-art fantasies leave me so empty and uninterested.

What brought me to gaming, and specifically D&D, was the sense that I'd come upon a method of codification which could serve to describe Antra, almost in terms of a "physics" reference. Antra already existed, and had gone through several distinct iterations--"ages"--in my head, some of which had been physically modeled as hand-built miniatures, drawings, stories and maps. D&D provided the first necessary structure for explaining the world to others.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 24/314 (1/24/12)
Today I will fight giant beetles hidden in waving grass.

I got up and got the groundcover working this morning, as well as a few more buildings in.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 23/314 (1/23/12)
Busy weekend. Got up at 4:30 on Saturday morning and started in on an upgrade for a server at work. Went at that pretty much straight through all day until I collapsed that evening about nine. Sunday I didn't get started until six, but bashed through the last steps of the upgrade and sent it off for testing--trying to launch it over a local holiday, but I haven't heard back from my tester yet. Now it's Monday morning and time to get ready to go in again.

One thing I did figure out yesterday, finally at long last, was how to get the player figure to move from the jumping pose to the swimming pose, because I am an inveterate jumper into waterholes. Just running into the water simply isn't as much fun as cannonballing, so I have taken a few stabs at fixing this on and off, and I finally found the right tweak to pull it off.

Since there is quite a bit of swimming planned for some early missions, I really needed this transition to work, because well, jumping in and jumping off is going to happen, and the animation can't freeze into the wrong position, because that's too lame. So yay! Now, shower and off to the pit.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 19/314 (1/19/12)
Got up at 4 o'clock this morning. Was tired, but sat down and continued integrating the 1.2 for 1.1 patch. I'm compiling at each step and testing, testing, testing at each step of the way.

Then I took an hour and implemented Vince Gee's ever-so-clever mob occlusion patch, which should help greatly with displaying the large, scenic zone areas in the game. I know City of Heroes implemented a scheme like this to deal with the density of their zone events like Rikti Raids, so I am glad to have Gee's example code--just the number of static personalities designed so far > 50, so being able to cull mobs out of scene rendering is impossibly valuable.

The last few days of testing have run very well, although mostly it's just been firing up the client, logging in and letting it run while working on something else. I've spawned 100 mobs in various corners of the map this morning, and intend to let them wander all day, just to see what happens--I bet most of them wind up in a Zaar pool!

Second Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 18/314 (1/18/12)
Last night I came home and worked. Could not stay awake past nine, so this morning I got up and worked some more. Got the oak trees back in, got the count right in Gatehouse housing, made lots of notes and organized things. Fixed the materials file again. Got several pieces of the 1.2 Patch for 1.1 into the codebase. Read a couple of chapters of AFX documentation. The kind of busy which makes the hours pass in pleasant fashion.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 17/314 (1/17/12)
Woke up early this morning, then got up and got to work. Got a weapon crafted to replace the club for the monster. At the moment it's a pink dot to help me position it properly on the model, then I'll scale it down to too small to see.

I'd really like to understand animation better in the engine. The sequences seem to play too fast for me, and I really want to be able to better trigger and override sequences. I guess I'll be spending some hours tweaking parameters until I get a better handle on how to control the ai behavior, too.

First Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 16/314 (1/16/12)
Got the spider classes in from deepscratch, and spent the weekend implementing them, getting up at 4 AM on Saturday and hacking through until midnight, then again on Sunday. I did take a few hours out to work on a project rollout for the day job, too, and though today's supposed to be a holiday, I have to head into the office and get some work done there.

The spider is in, and hooked up to the UAISK system. There seems to be a problem with switching animation sequences, with a bug occurring when setActionThread is called from script. I was able to get it to reliably play at least the death animation after some experimentation; originally it would keep idling afterwards and that's just wrong--it is necessary to see the enemy defeated.

As the spider has been given its own formal class, I think I will see if I can trap the animation calls in the engine, and force them to play from there--according to the forums, setActionThread will work reliably if called in the engine code. Need to try that... the enemies can attack and be defeated, but it looks so much better if they are animating based on each state change.

First Tikid, Hour of the Basilisk, 11/314 (1/11/12)
I pronounce it fixed. I'm up testing with datablock caching reenabled on the desktop, and am about to shut down and copy the client over to the laptop and test there--also have the client running at 16-20 fps now on the 9400M under Windows on my four-year old MacBook.

Yes, that's my testing platform... I figure it has to be as screwed up a platform choice as anything actually out there in userland. Well, anything out there in userland the code is going to be assumed to run on, anyway.

In any case, BUG FIXED! Development may proceed. After another backup. Maybe two.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 10/314 (1/10/12)
And... more becomes clear. It's the forest... it has to be. It's the only thing currently set up for LOD so it has to be what is causing the GFX fault related to impostors, which I understand are part of the billboarding mechanism that makes forests possible. I looked at the server and client, and both of their "trees" folders were missing and didn't match at all, so I carefully built those directories and put them in.

I think I painted some trees on the other side of the Zaar pool in front of the hospital, too. I believe what happened (besides all the other nonsense I've been finding and documenting) is that when you zone in, something broken in the default tree LOD mechanism in the forest editor forces an attempt at a billboarding check, and there is some bug in the code that makes it a "delicate" time to check for that, so bang!

There is a C++ patch for the forest in the 1.2 Bug Fix Update for 1.1. I'm going to put that in and recompile and see if it helps... the 11/23 build I reverted to Sunday does not contain that code.

The most important thing, though, is I let a bot kill me three times and was able to zone to the hospital with triggering the GFX crash, which has been allowing one res occasionally but never two. This gives me some hope of moving forward again soon. I'll cling to that, but I have to go get ready for work.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 10/314 (1/10/12)
Well, that was pretty awesome... I remembered to set all the VFX settings to "low" before entering the game on the laptop, and it ran. Still only 16 fps, but crickets that's almost workable. I think I am going to have to throw everything out and start over, however, because the bug after hosping twice won't stop biting. I think I just found a perfect storm of combinatorials, and the engine just can't handle it at that point. I've gone so far in the past weeks trying to find the exact cause as to put the broken materials files back one by one, hoping they wind up cancelling each other out in the load stack, but nada. No go.

Do I have it in me? Do I have time? I'm going to try disabling datablock caching next, but if even reverting back a month can't fix it, I'm pretty stuck. Can feel head turning to fudge just starting to think about it.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 9/314 (1/9/12)
I reverted back to the 11/23 build yesterday afternoon, after once again finding the crashing getting worse instead of better. Then I started porting in the last month's worth of models one-by-one. It's tedious, but I've already tried just a straight copy and it didn't work. And of course, extensive testing with the addition of each model. I simply can find no other way to do it, and I can't live with an unstable client. It's so annoying to get dropped as a player.

I think this is the reason why glaring bugs stay in MMOs forever. These bugs are so subtle and so interwoven into the fabric of the connection sequence that they are too difficult and too expensive to find when they start cropping up. I only have the luxury of scrapping a month's work because I am an independent... I invested the time I've had, decades of it, rather than the money I hadn't. Now an argument could be made that commercial developers know what they're doing going in, which is true; but looking at the MMOs and the bugs they had and have I'm not sure that argument isn't entirely specious.

In any case, rebuilding the Gatehouse level right now, model by model. Then on to Rough and Market, the other two levels with significant changes over the last month.

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 8/314 (1/8/12)
OK, I think I found it, I mean, really found it found it. Spent yesterday and into the night, then got up this morning still chasing the cause of the crash which has been plauging me. Rebuilt a hybrid from backup and the zone files in the most exactingly careful manner, and was still bugged.

Found and traced a long-standing bug in the %pos variable sent on damage from the melee weapons, too... this is a bug which crashed only sporadically, but would hit just before the hospital zone was offered, so it looked very much like part of the crash which happened after the zone in took place.

Having eliminated that problem, I finally just deleted all the tree models, and their files. The client folder had hundreds of textures in it, as I'd just PUT EVERYTHING IN from the RRGTS folder in an attempt to force Torque to find the material it would not stop complaining about a couple days ago.

It turns out there was a zip archive hidden in that morass, and there was a lengthy materials file IN IT. Torque read the zip--I think this was the huge lag on zone in, every time it needed a material and the camera was rotated. So this has really been a bunch of bugs, I think, again appearing so closely together they appeared the same issue, when it turned out to be a bunch of subtle little issues, some longstanding, like the %pos variable being passed as empty out of all the melee weapon datablock damage scripts.

I really hope I fixed it...

Second Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 5/314 (1/5/12)
Up at six, spent most of the morning composing an email reply to a question which came in, then downloaded the model files I bought last night to represent vegetables from Dex-Soft. I am totally happy at the prospect of putting corn, strawberry and squash plants in Resident Zirkot.

Pulling myself up out of the bleak space I've spent the last month in... the holidays were not very much fun this year for me, but I hope I didn't let on too much. My life has been, is, and will be punctuated by these breaks, and the surest way out of them is to accept them, and fight like hell to get out of the hole once they pass. It used to take me years to recover; a month? That's progress. It really is a technique of giving yourself something to look forward to, I think. And, of course, remembering that you have things to look forward to.

Still a sucky six weeks, though.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Priestess, 4/314 (1/4/12)
The evening was spent loading and comparing backup versions back to the beginning of December. Even the oldest I looked at was exhibiting the DXD9 error message, now that I know what I am looking for, so the problem is not introducing LOD. I'm baffled now... I've implemented the 1.2 Bugfix for 1.1, and have lost footprints in the process, but have not fixed whatever the underlying error is. It's deep in the C++ codebase and over my head.

Oddly, after copying over the forest-related files and tree art again from backup, the crash which follows the DXD9 error in the console doesn't occur. If one waits until the AFX tool buttons draw themselves--something which began taking an inordinately long time about the same time the crashes started occurring--one can then proceed to move. It's almost as though until the buttons draw, the camera is not hooked up to the player, and the crash occurs when one starts to move.

Hmm... I wonder if the test trap in the mousepress used for housing detection is going off while the player is in an invalid state? Something to look at tonight, for sure. I can always try keeping the zoning GUI in place for another ten seconds, although that is such a hack.

First Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 3/314 (1/3/12)
Most of yesterday into the evening went into an attempt to patch the 1.2 Bugfix for 1.1 into the AFX-laced codebase. Surprisingly, it worked, except for footprint decals. Attempts to repair that led to weirder and weirder results, eventually resulting in the shader compiler insisting there were fourteen lights... no, I'm not kidding:

GFXD3D9Shader::_compileShader - 
Error compiling shader: E_FAIL: An 
undetermined error occurred (80004005)
C:/Torque/AFX2 for T3D Pro 1.1
QR/My Projects/WOA_2012Client/
game/shaders/procedural/
a7b5c41ca9b5ee30_P.hlsl(76,4):
warning X3206: 'compute4Lights':
implicit truncation of vector type
C:/Torque/AFX2 for T3D Pro 1.1 QR
/My Projects/WOA_2012Client/
game/shaders/procedural/
a7b5c41ca9b5ee30_P.hlsl(76,4):
error X3013: 'compute4Lights': 
function does not take 14 parameters

Not the results I wanted, exactly, and it seemed the connection attempts got flakey. This morning I decided, however, that I had been able to resolve the really crucial question--the horse still worked, which was and is and has been my concern. If I can keep that piece of code, I'd be happy... so much invested in getting that to work.

I did not want to port, but I am getting fatal DXD9 errors in my console log, and when I see them, I know the client is going to crash shortly. I can rebuild the level from scratch, or I can try the bugfix, or I can port to 1.2 so I am not struggling to backport future bug fixes and features to 1.1. I'm downloading the AFX 1.2 port right now--the footprints and the like errors are probably due to my missing some crucial bit of AFX code--and will try blunt-porting the missions, etc. tonight.

I will most likely have to face building the thing up again clean from scratch... Gatehouse mission is out of control, anyway, and this whole thing seemed to start about the time I started using the Shape Editor to insert LODs, but hot darn, it was working so well there for a bit, and now it is crashing on zoning, and I swear I didn't change anything but assets.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 2/314 (1/2/12)
Day of the Rune, day of seriousness. Week in review. Wow, I made a lot of templates... Twenty-five variant website designs. I figured out how to do level-of-display in T3D. I figured out how to serve display type over the web. I learned how to use CSS3 to automatically step down based on the display output.

Dead quiet in San Rafael this morning. I think I like it. That is a red sky. Defragmenting a disk this morning, as I got up and hit invisible collisions this morning, and don't know what else to do. It seems to have helped in the past. Torque is making me crazy with it's instability; I spend far more time fixing things than making things, although it's all part of "developing" I suppose.

First Tikid, Hour of the Houri, 1/314 (1/1/12)
I've spent hours and hours cleaning up materials files. There are still some lurking errors, including the dread "cannot map unnamed material" error; but every little bit helps. There were a lot of errors in the furnishings materials, like all of them. I don't think I'd looked in that materials file before, or maybe I had when I took it on faith models came with valid materials files--those were the models I bought from Black Skull. Or maybe that file was valid in some other engine. But it was not a T3D materials file.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Dagger, 1/314 (1/1/12)
Woke up at 4:30 this morning, thinking about materials errors. Combed through and found another couple. Then I created a green globe light, and set about replacing all the street lighting in the City. There were 136 instances of that particle flame being used in torches, and I'm about to launch the client and see if there is any improvement in frame rate using a static globe instead of a particle effect.