Howdy
Last week i spent a few hours tracking down a crash that sometimes happens when exiting to the main menu. With most crashes, I can find the cause pretty easily by having the game write to the log file at specific points so I can see exactly where it fails (or if I’m really lucky, the log will already have an error from whatever caused the crash).
No such luck this time. The menu initialized just fine - it was only a few frames after loading the menu that the crash actually occurred. I made a special build of the game with a loop that infinitely hosts, returns to the menu, and hosts again, because my fingers were getting tired. When the crash finally happened, I opened the Windows Event Viewer (amazing UI, I know) to find this:
Turns out, the crash was triggering from the discord sdk, which means I messed something up in our voice chat implementation. Due to some stupidity on my end , the voice chat call wasn’t ended for a moment after leaving a lobby, but the discord voice lobby associated with the in-game lobby was left, so the call was trying to access memory that the lobby had already freed.
In the end, all I had to do was reorder a few lines of code.
I’ve been working on a big change coming to pattern infusion - in 1.0 most upgrade stats will be affected by the size of their upgrade patterns. This helps balance out being able to make large upgrades a lot smaller, but it also buffs upgrades if you infuse a larger pattern into them, which should make for some interesting build choices. Upgrades whose stats depend on surrounding cells aren’t affected by this change.
-Liam
Recently I’ve been making some new fungifal effects, and everything’s gotta get tested somehow…
This snippet is only a small part of a much larger effect that will attach to several different things at a time. On the technical side of things, the system uses a buffer, a container for data that keeps track of targets, their size, and their position to dictate how many tendrils to make, and where they should go (currently this buffer only contains a single Roachard).
When it comes to effects like this, I want them to feel very tactile to capture the fear (or other emotion…) that many grabbing tentacles might evoke. For me this translates into a lot of whipping motion when they attach, and wiggling with ‘strain’ to give the illusion of tension. The physics here are completely faked however, unlike a similar effect: the line on Scrapper’s Grapple Pole. In the case of the grappling line, it’s of very little consequence what happens to it after it’s released, which gives us the luxury of that super elastic spring & reeling motion. For these tentacles though, which will be very numerous and provide valuable information to the player, I don’t want to be meeting a physics system in the middle. Even if that means more effort towards an incredibly similar (and potentially stiffer) result, in my opinion it’s always worth knowing how and when to fake your physics for the sake of getting the player the information they need.
We’re working very hard on 1.0, which is beyond exciting for all of us. But as much as I’d like to gush about all the cool new stuff we’re working on, I believe it’s all best left behind the curtain for now…
-Noah