I say do what ya gotta do man. We can wait for it....
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Thomas Ward
Sent: Monday, August 01, 2011 1:32 PM
To: Gamers Discussion list
Subject: [Audyssey] MOTA Development setbacks
Hi everyone,
I know a number of you have asked about beta 21. Many of you have noticed
that the Mysteries of the Ancients home page says beta 21 on the website,
but there is no download available. Well, here is the reason why.
Anyone who has been programming for any length of time knows that 25% of
the
time is actually spent on writing/designing the software and the other
75%
is spent on debugging or trying to fix it. I must confess that I am no
exception to the rule. In particular Mysteries of the Ancients is no
exception either, and I've got a hard lesson in if it isn't broke don't
try
to fix it. Reason being after a month of trying to fix Mysteries of the
Ancients beta 20 I've come to realize what I have on my hands is a big
problem. Oh, it can be fixed but how I plan to resolve the problem is
likely
to set us back somewhat in the process.
Basically, what happened is when I started work on beta 19 I modified
Mysteries of the Ancients so it would compile and run on the
cross-platform
engine. Along the way I fixed a number of bugs present in beta 18, but of
course people weren't too happy about FMOD Ex for audio. So I thought,
"no
big deal. I'll just change everything back, recompile, and it will work
just
fine." Wrong!
Sometime after I edited the MOTA beta 19 source code, recompiled it with
the
Windows G3D engine the game has never worked quite right ever since. The
game crashes when you alt+tab away from the window, torches burn out
after
25 seconds or so, levers reset before they are suppose to, Angela
sometimes
instantly dies after getting attacked by a Harpy, and all sorts of
unusual
bugs like that. I've fixed or addressed some of the bugs, but not all of
them. After a month of trying to correct them one by one I've given up
trying on the current version. I've concluded while the bugs might be
fixable there might be a simpler but slightly less desirable alternative
to
the problem which I will explain below.
As many of you know I use a Linux computer for much of my day to day
work.
One of the programming tools I have installed is called subversion. What
subversion does for a developer like myself is I can checkin or backup
changes to an ongoing project and it will catalog and store every single
version of the source code being worked on. So if I want to return to an
older release it is easy as logging into subversion and telling it I want
to
checkout the 0.18 source code and it will download the 0.18 source code
to
my project directory. This makes it a simple matter for a developer to
roll
back to a prior release if necessary. In this case I think it is more
than
necessary.
So what I plan to do is delete the beta 20/21 source code and checkout
0.18,
beta 18, from subversion since I know that version wasn't nearly as buggy
as
beta 20. Once I checkout the beta 18 source code from subversion I can
attempt to patch it with some of the changes, but as I've forgotten what
exactly I fixed in beta 19 and beta 20 some old bugs may return in beta
21.
Plus some features such as speech interrupt were added later and won't be
available to you until I go back in and add that support to Mysteries of
the
Ancients. Basically, as I said earlier this will set us back on our
development schedule, but I think this is a necessary measure as it is
the
only way I can think of to correct some of these bugs that simply were
not
present in beta 18 and earlier. So here is the plan.
I'm going to checkout beta 18 this afternoon, work on a patch to bring
beta
18 more or less up to current, and release that as beta 21. Once we test
that, find any bugs that need fixed, features that need to be put back
in,
etc I'll release an update, beta 22, to resolve any left over issues in
trying to upgrade beta 18 to current. It could take a couple of weeks to
really get everything back up to speed so to speak, but I think the
problem
is fixable. It will just take a little time and patients on everyone's
part.
Cheers!
---
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