Ok so I got “interviewed”/tested by game company X at around 3am today (due to the difference in timezones)… and now it’s 5:30am and I can’t sleep because I’m still running on “MUST STAY AWAKE!” fuel.
I was totally expecting a voice interview via Skype with verbal technical questions and discussions, and perhaps a few tests or assignments. I was preparing my microphone, and video camera just in case, warming up my voice and drinking hot chocolate. Few hours ago I reviewed multi-threading, network programming, animation, shaders, the whole thing..
2 days of memory leakage hunting, I refactored at least 3 main components of the game (so far) and still about 4MB of memory leakage! who the hell is doing that??! I haven’t looked inside Away3D yet though..
As I’m digging deeper, I started to discover the horrors beneath.. you see Zamron had this life cycle so far:
started as a hello world to test pseudo 3D in Flash
developed into a proof of concept in only 48 hours, the first 24 hours of that was spent trying to get a pseudo 3D engine working correctly
decided to give it a few more days and called it wolf
arrived at a “pseudo” good experience for a flash game, so I started expanding it hoping to turn it into some kind of game, the biggest mistake I did was trying to use wolf’s code as is, I should have started from scratch here.. I guess I just wanted to do it quickly in the spirit of Ludum Dare
Zamron idea was born as my entry for ludum dare october challenge, I didn’t make it in time. But I’m pretty close to finishing it now
One of the worst problems I’m facing is the horrible base that was part of wolf, you’d think a retro fps should be simple enough to do, but as I’m adding more stuff to Zamron, those “simple enough” parts started to grow and get hairy.. which is where I am now, the only weapon I have against this uncontrolled growth is refactoring and more refactoring… :-/
I’m having an issue with a massive memory leak about 8MB per level in Zamron, even though I’m making extremely sure to remove and nullify everything after a level ends… Away3D seems to not have a hand in it even though it’s what I’m using to render the game.
Going to investigate embedded textures and also look for any lingering events that might be causing this. Definitely had more productive days..
Alas, I couldn’t finish Zamron in time and not even close (today is the last submission day but I’m still working on level 3!), but now I’m so determined to finish it anyway.. it’s personal :<
My development/time plans were sound but the reason why I couldn’t finish it is probably because I didn’t do much work during the last 2 weeks or so, it has been a crazy month… I was assuming that my engineering degree will take = (rand() % 10) + 2 months giving me enough time to finish Zamron, First Defense, and Escapor.. however, I got it right in the middle of last month! and everything changed :’(
Written from scratch, don’t trust most examples out there they are either using API things that changed in the release Flash 11 or are just written using substandard Actionscript 3 (aka. stupidly)… in both cases you get an empty screen with stats showing correctly.
NOTE: Flash is killed by Adobe so I expect all URLs listed here to vanish
Since Flash 11 is released yesterday, I thought I might as well try the Stage3D (Molehill), at least to set my development tools if I wanted to do something with it in the near future..
The information out there about Stage3D and setting it up with FlashDevelop is confusing and outdated, google didn’t help much, I followed what seems to be the main method to set up the incubator playerglobal.swc and an unofficial flash player debugger which I couldn’t get to “debug” things, then I just found that Adobe did release an official player debugger and playerglobal.swc yesterday! but google didn’t show it in the results probably because it’s very recent and I couldn’t find a direct link for it easily within Adobe Flex/Flash developers pages today (probably because I’m blind), so here it is if someone missed it: https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html
WARNING:this post is written while being very sleepy, my linguistic abilities deteriorate during this state, so excuse anything that doesn’t make sense hehe
Today, no sleep, and 7 hours of work, then I went to University to check whether my engineering BSc certificate is … made.. yet I guess, and it wasn’t, they postponed me to 1st of October (3 days from now, not bad).
Yes, a 3 day project that lasted.. well a lot more than 3 days obviously. I’ve been logging a few details about progress in twitter for reference, working is going much slower than the initial burst of work because I didn’t plan for something this big :-S
But I feel like I learned things and solved new types of problems, so it’s all in good sports :) here’s a little brief on how things went so far:
The most revolutionary documentary I’ve ever seen about humanity, it’s problems, and it’s future, and it actually presents impressive technological solutions.. a total eye opener.. I’m actually joining the Zeitgeist movement~! :D
