Posted in Engine Programming | Nov 13, 2013 by Philipp Schäfer
Hello and Welcome. I am happy to announce that I finally had some time to dig around in our code again.
Since we are now a more or less small team some would think a bug tracker is not necessary anymore. But since ours is working we used it anyway and it has proven itself very useful. Sometimes someone is just busy so you can use the bug tracker as a memo. Then there are tasks you just want to be sure about that they are not forgotten, and last but not least there are big tasks and enhancements that need to be saved for later. After all you will have a nice time line in the end, which shows you what was done and who did what. On the other hand there are often some small bugs that take less time to fix, than to put them into a management system – “imo” this is enough reason not to do it. Bottom line: In our next release you will encounter much less bugs – but hopefully until now you did not encounter any — since most of them are pretty cryptic to achieve anyway.
I also had the time to make some improvements that impact you indirectly. One of the best ones is the hot reloading of our shader …. this is useful – soooo useful!!! I can recommend it so much. The core benefit is a quick testing of or shaders while the game is running. This allows us to test colors, parameters and new algorithms instantly. Something else I can recommend when reworking your code is refactoring. It’s useful in common programming and super-useful when reworking and reorganising your code base. Especially the extract function is doing a surprisingly good job.
Sadly most of the new bugs were not really entertaining. But some were and I created a little video with them. I added some unsorted bugs from the old times as well (In case you wonder about the different graphics).
