Week 11 starting to finish up

Winning display.

This week both Pete and I asked Matt if we could host a Beta Test during next weeks tutorial session. He was pretty enthused to have the opportunity and seemed pretty impressed that we had reached that stage. I think we still have a fair bit of coding to do, but we are definitely ready to get some real testing done, and it needs to be on a bigger scale.

We set about getting some serious coding done during our class, one the first problems and most sever was with the collision detection. We discovered that the collision detection system wasn't colliding with objects as they should. Both Pete and I attempted to rework the Collision Manager and put in as many debugging messages we could to help diagnose the problem. The problem seemed to occur after Pete had made changes to the Vector class turning it into a base class with two different types of vectors as sub classes (Cartesian and Polar). We end up spending most the day trying to fix this problem by optimizing our code and changing it around to be more modular, but none of this seemed to resolve the problem, but it did improve some performance in the game. In end after close to 5 hours of looking over the code, Pete discovered that it was actually a very small problem inside the Vector class were it wasn't comparing the location of the two objects being checked for collisions, the problem was fixed once Pete updated the code. This seems to be the problem the both of us are visiting more frequently lately, the more complex and large the code gets the hard it is to find and debug these problems no matter how big or SMALL they are.

Pete's been talking about the Combo system for about a week or two, so we stepped back and started talking about how the combo system should work. To start with we both agreed that the combo system should be the main source for triggering events to other players, so depending on how big the combo was determines the strength of the event. Based on this theory Pete set about coding it all whilst I worked on other things.

I tweaked the GUI some more, this time I brought back the Listbox on the right side to list all the available games. At the moment, it is not possible to change which game you play unless you physically change it in the source code. So I setup the Listbox with both the games we have so far, and made it switch the active game each time you select one. The engine then gathers the active game and creates a new instance of it.






I added in a couple more triggers for the engine, this time to deal with when the player dies or wins the game. First of all I created a new texture in Photoshop that can be used for more than just 1 thing, by moving around the texture coordinates I can use the one texture to get all three words off it. I decided to update the "loading" texture as well because I have been using one specific font for everything else in the game, so I thought it would be fitting to use it here too to maintain the look and feel.

After doing some testing with Pete I found the winning triggers were not working accurately, the engine wasn't reporting the correct winner, in some cases reporting all players to be losers. I'm not sure of the problem at the moment I will have to trace the data flow to make sure everything is being set properly.