So here I am 00:05am on 5th of August 2008. Pretty soon I will be 37 and I find myself doing the same thing I have been doing since at least 2001 – working late on a game. So far my average going to be time is 02:30am and getting up time 09:00am at which point I start another long day of game coding and testing. This time it feels little different though because it’s a project I care about and it’s worth the extra effort being put in. Tomorrow (today?) we burn the gold master, which will then be sent for review and possibly to our distributers so it has to be damn good, hence the mega crunch.
To compound things, last week I was with Mark and Vic at the Develop conference in Brighton. And while it was an amazing conference where I met up with a lot of old friends from various games companies and made a few new ones, I didn’t get much sleep. Mainly because the hotel room was hot and I had to have the windows open which was obviously an open invitation to Seagulls to start screaming at me. ‘Why me?’ I would plead to them followed by ‘Look – Mark’s window is open, go scream at him for a while’. Needless to say it didn’t work and Mark reported a totally restful night and what the hell was I on about? Vic on the other hand is an absolute party animal and would be rolling into the Hotel at about the same time as we were having breakfast and would still look amazingly fresh as if she had not been out.
So, what have we been doing on Multiwinia? Mainly, it’s been an exercise in going through the bug database trying to get rid of as many sync errors as we could. Not easy since a lot of them are damn near impossible to reproduce. Today was fun though because we had nearly all the dev team playing the game at 16:30 for an hour trying to test all the possible ways to generate a sync error. We managed it too which came up with the conclusion that the spectator mode I put in this week has to come out till we find out what all the bugs are to do with this mode and sync errors. This had the knock on effect of me writing code to stop players joining in on a full server. This currently manifests itself as greying out the full servers in the server list and having them not respond to mouse clicks. The problem with games when they come to gold master time is that as a developer you never feel they are ready. I mean, when is a game ready? When all the bugs are gone? Show me a totally bug free game and I will be shaking you to try and wake you out of the deep sleep you are obviously in. MMMmmm sleeeeeep… I can see a pattern forming.
So hopefully tomorrow will go fine. It has to because we all booked to go and see Dark Night at the London iMax tomorrow and I for one need some time off – I have even begun to dream about Multiwinians and sync errors.
On a lighter note: There are some events in game that have me laughing out loud. One such event was when testing the game today. I noticed that the Yellow team had sent out a small force to creep up on me. So, I promoted a Multiwinian to an Officer and formed a small squad to meet these sneaky Yellows. So there we were poised to pounce onto one another when suddenly a lightning strike hits the Yellow squad and they scattered in all directions on fire – screaming as they ran. This caught me by total surprise and all I could do was laugh hysterically and then feel really guilty about those poor AI units in pain. I’ll get over it.
Tales from the front line S01E06
There are always casualties of war
Last edited by elexis on Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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RabidZombie
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RabidZombie
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- Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2005 10:09 pm
Gold master already, my how time flies.
I dislike missing sleep also, I was in France with work last week, same sort of nonsense, couldn't sleep.
I dislike missing sleep also, I was in France with work last week, same sort of nonsense, couldn't sleep.
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Re: Tales from the front line S01E06
Byron wrote:So there we were poised to pounce onto one another when suddenly a lightning strike hits the Yellow squad and they scattered in all directions on fire – screaming as they ran. This caught me by total surprise and all I could do was laugh hysterically and then feel really guilty about those poor AI units in pain. I’ll get over it.
You undoubtedly used your mighty Dev-god powers to smite your foes and now are trying to cover it up by saying that you didn't know a thing and felt sorry for them.
But you won't trick me! And next time my DGs are hit by lightning I'll know who to blame.
Re: Tales from the front line S01E06
Xocrates wrote:Byron wrote:So there we were poised to pounce onto one another when suddenly a lightning strike hits the Yellow squad and they scattered in all directions on fire – screaming as they ran. This caught me by total surprise and all I could do was laugh hysterically and then feel really guilty about those poor AI units in pain. I’ll get over it.
You undoubtedly used your mighty Dev-god powers to smite your foes and now are trying to cover it up by saying that you didn't know a thing and felt sorry for them.
But you won't trick me! And next time my DGs are hit by lightning I'll know who to blame.
Couldn't possibly comment.
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multimania
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Re: Tales from the front line S01E06
Byron wrote:Couldn't publicly comment.
Fix'd
jelco the galactaboy wrote:They probably want to look cool by releasing a first patch days after release to fix annoying bugs some people spot when they play it for the first time - if you've got seven weeks for your first patch this is very possible.
Wouldn't be a first either. Warcraft 3 had a patch released on release day.
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