(Click or tap to enlarge)
The first good news is that your newly-upgraded weapon system can thoroughly pulverize the Magic Space Crystals that you see floating around you. As everybody knows, Magic Space Crystals are full of Woo-Woo, and I’ll soon be adding special equipment allowing you to harvest this valuable energy for the war effort (against the Fraternal Brotherhood of Evil Magic Space Robots).
The bad news is that the Rapier physics engine has started randomly locking up the game’s logic thread from time-to-time. :/ This sometimes happens after a few seconds of gameplay, and sometimes takes 10-15 minutes to trigger. It’s the kind of bug that is very difficult to reproduce, and therefore very difficult to track down, but I’ve traced it far enough to know that it is happening deep inside parts of the physics engine that I don’t understand.
The other good news, however, is that Rapier (with the configuration I’m currently using) is deterministic, and I’ve built this game around an event system, so it should be possible to simply log the input events with their timestamps, and capture a sequence of game inputs which will quickly trigger the bug on-demand. This should ultimately allow me to track down the source of the problem, and report it (ideally with a fix) to the project’s maintainers.
This will also have the practical upshot of allowing highly efficient recording of gameplay, with file sizes small enough to trivially attach to an email. This means, if you are playing and something weird happens, I should be able to take that recording and use it to examine the game’s state, to diagnose and fix anything broken or confusing.
Anyway, this physics engine lock-up issue has definitely slowed things down, but if you don’t mind the risk of lock-ups you’re welcome to try the updated demo. Note that you should be able to Alt-Tab out of the game and close it from the task bar if you encounter the lock-up.
Download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.
(Archived gamedev post from 2025-04-10)
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