Tag Archives: bugs

Baby Steps

Posted on by

I have been looking into a couple of issues still plaguing Doomdark’s Revenge game play.

The first one is movement. I have to admit, I dropped the ball on this one. I wrote this code so long ago, that I assumed it was working. Well it isn’t. And there are three issues at play.

The first issue is actually a bug fix.

There are two versions of movement tables, one that the Spectrum used, and one that the c64 used. What these tables do, is decide which terrain the character gets for free. The problem is, the spectrum version had a bug. It didn’t point to the required table, it pointed to random memory. Therefore movement on the Spectrum doesn’t work as intended. I had fixed this bug. Which means, movement on the new version isn’t the same as either the Spectrum version of the C64.

Secondly, The Lords of Midnight movement code is based on leaving the current location. Doomdark’s Revenge is actually based on the location you are moving into. I had this wrong.

And thirdly, if you move into a location with a critter, you take a penalty. However because of the difference in the way I implemented the critters on the map, ie: 0 = NONE, whereas 0xff is NONE in the original. My critter check was always triggering. Thus you always got a penalty.

The three items combined, make for pretty shoddy movement, when compared directly to the original.

First week snagging…

Posted on by

20140220-084247.jpgRelease week is always frustrating. On Android I just cannot test on enough devices, so I know that something is always going to bite me, and Monday morning it did. None of my Android testers had had any problems with the game loading, but Monday morning a number of devices were reporting that the game wouldn’t load. Later that night I spent a few fraught hours fighting with hotel WiFi trying to get an update tested by the affected customers, and then released.

In this instance it was an easy fix. In fact, I had already addressed the issue the previous week for the Windows release. Some last minute testing on my Mac Desktop running a windows VM, full screen, highlighted an issue of loading the splash screen. At the high resolution the splash screen was larger than 2048. When this image was being loaded, it was converted into a power-of-two texture and thus a 4096×4096 texture. The texture loader I was using was choking on that. A quick change to the affected images, across all resolutions, resulted in a fix, and a 5mb reduction in app size to boot!

This was the problem that affected some Android devices. So all I needed to do was rebuild the current version for Android and send it back out. In the end, the Android release was probably a lot smoother than The Lords of Midnight.
Continue reading →