Weekend in review...
Yes, this is late, I know as the week is now half over. I've been busy, so you'll have to live with the tardiness of the post.
Friday night: was working madly on getting ready for the LARP. Lots of writing and suffering from my brain wiring. You see, as I was working on the game, it occurred to me how useful it would be to able to search the character's background information. Something that should be easy enough to implement, right? You would think. Something funny was happening with the code, causing the CPU to peg out around 100% and spike the memory usage to up around 2 GB for the IIS application.
Debugging was going on was difficult because of the memory and processor constraints. What was bothering me so much, though, was the fuck that I was stuck. I could not get past it. I would tell myself that I needed to work on content rather than fiddling with code. I knew this is where the work I should be focusing on ought to be the game content, but I could not take my mind off it. I had to fix the problem. There was nothing I could do stop myself.
Frankly, it drives me completely nuts. Anytime there is a computer problem, I will focus on it until it is solved. Focus really isn't the right word. It's more like I obsess about it and it becomes the driving desire. The only time I stop before it's done is when I am on the verge collapse. Even then that doesn't always work.
I eventually found the problem: the counter variable used in the loop that was iterating across the characters was not, for some reason I could not discern, incrementing. I looked and I am positive that it was some side effect because I was passing the variable by value, meaning I was passing a copy of variable and not the variable itself, to the helper function. So that couldn't be it. For what ever , the counter was stuck at 2. Forever, causing a tight loop that brought the system to its knees. The fix was to use a different variable name.
In the grand scheme of things, this feature was icing. While it makes life easier and could've waited, but I could not let it go. The fact that I was helpless to it bothers me a lot.
We ended up canceling the Ji Dian Station game as sylvan was sick. I survived the vampire game on Saturday night. Score! Mission accomplished and now Mr. Crescent can get on with paying work. ;)
Sunday was a photo shoot with Jenny Rotten of the Nasty Habits and then a play session later.
Friday night: was working madly on getting ready for the LARP. Lots of writing and suffering from my brain wiring. You see, as I was working on the game, it occurred to me how useful it would be to able to search the character's background information. Something that should be easy enough to implement, right? You would think. Something funny was happening with the code, causing the CPU to peg out around 100% and spike the memory usage to up around 2 GB for the IIS application.
Debugging was going on was difficult because of the memory and processor constraints. What was bothering me so much, though, was the fuck that I was stuck. I could not get past it. I would tell myself that I needed to work on content rather than fiddling with code. I knew this is where the work I should be focusing on ought to be the game content, but I could not take my mind off it. I had to fix the problem. There was nothing I could do stop myself.
Frankly, it drives me completely nuts. Anytime there is a computer problem, I will focus on it until it is solved. Focus really isn't the right word. It's more like I obsess about it and it becomes the driving desire. The only time I stop before it's done is when I am on the verge collapse. Even then that doesn't always work.
I eventually found the problem: the counter variable used in the loop that was iterating across the characters was not, for some reason I could not discern, incrementing. I looked and I am positive that it was some side effect because I was passing the variable by value, meaning I was passing a copy of variable and not the variable itself, to the helper function. So that couldn't be it. For what ever , the counter was stuck at 2. Forever, causing a tight loop that brought the system to its knees. The fix was to use a different variable name.
In the grand scheme of things, this feature was icing. While it makes life easier and could've waited, but I could not let it go. The fact that I was helpless to it bothers me a lot.
We ended up canceling the Ji Dian Station game as sylvan was sick. I survived the vampire game on Saturday night. Score! Mission accomplished and now Mr. Crescent can get on with paying work. ;)
Sunday was a photo shoot with Jenny Rotten of the Nasty Habits and then a play session later.