Our ever awesome programmers solved this bug by making all conversations trigger anything with their own names suffixed with _Stopped upon terminating. This happens regardless of whether you wait until the conversation ends or you walk away from it.

Last week, Lawrence built Release Candidate 1 and started a quick playthrough of the WorldCorp storyline. I downloaded it, burned it to a disc, installed it on my laptop, and started a test run of the PlanetDeusEx storyline. Together, we would make sure no critical bugs had snuck into the game during our last month of hectic bug fixing. In one map, Lawrence found himself spontaneously teleported to a different level upon triggering an alarm.

We classified that as a critical bug.

Our ever excellent programmers tracked the problem down to a little bug in the recent conversation fix: Certain conversations would throw up an “accessed none” upon terminating, potentially triggering any object in the map without a tag. Fixing the accessed none fixed Larry’s spontaneous teleportation problem.

And that’s why you don’t want us to “just release it”. You want us to play through the final release candidate to make absolutely sure you won’t find yourself teleported to another level for no discernible reason. Have patience. It’ll just be a few more days.

As the project draws to a close, the rewards become greater and more numerous. In the beginning, you get a kick out of seeing your dialogue implemented, your characters animated, your world lit and ready to explore. Few feelings compare to the pride of hearing an actor interpret lines that you have written, however. And finally, letting people play the mod and hearing what they have to say about it is an amazing experience.

Also painful. But thrills like that don’t come for free, you understand.

Beta tester response to The Nameless Mod has generally been positive. Some testers felt compelled to play the mod for 5 hours at a time, tearing through the missions. Some testers are still mucking about in the first mission, poking it relentlessly to see how many different solutions it has (spoiler: A ridiculous, unbelievable amount). A few testers have been bogged down by our still annoyingly unstable first hub level, but they seem determined to defy the crashes and give the game a proper testing.

As an aside, how embarrassing is it that our first hub level crashes all the time? The rest of the game is almost completely stable (with the odd path finding error still needing to be found and fixed), but what good is that if most players give up because all the crashes are in the first mission? We’ve done some drastic things to eliminate them (the map used to be approximately 30% larger than it is now), but clearly not drastic enough. Methinks it’s time to give the ambient lighting in that map a complete overhaul.

Some annoying mistakes made it into the beta build. Predictably, almost all are results of last-minute fixes made during our short crunch before the beta deadline. Fixes beget new bugs, and though most of these are small mistakes, easy to fix, the sheer size of our builds (Beta 1 was 583 MB) makes it impractical to put out a new build until we’ve accumulated a greater amount of fixes.

Our game is structured into 5 “missions” (a Deus Ex term – more accurate nouns would be “chapters” or “sections”). Our first chapter makes up ca. 40% of the game, and has been tested thoroughly. Second chapter is tiny but notoriously buggy – we’ll see how many bugs persist in the beta 1 build – and the third is another enormous chapter, a revisit to the locales of chapter 1. Chapters 4 and 5 are small but brimming with special-case scripting and complex events and systems. These last two chapters have barely been tested at all in alpha, and I fear we may be flooded with bug reports when our diligent beta testers reach it.

Our testing method is aimless and far from thorough. We have no coordination between the testers to ensure that every corner and every plot branch of the mod is tested. We’re running a very real risk that certain more obscure branches may never be tested at all – that some choices are simply too unlikely to be made until a larger population of players gets their hands on the game. If this had been a real game, some form of automated unit testing would have been indispensible, but if I suggested any such thing to Shane or Nick at this point, they would strangle me to death with my own mouse cord. As it stands, we must cross our fingers and pray that everything is tested properly, and then patch after release if we turn out to be mistaken.

As the testing carries on, my ego swells to formerly unheard of sizes. It seems we’ve done it right, but of course we’re standing on the shoulder of giants. What TNM has taught us, essentially, is how best to design Deus Ex.

This would’ve never happened on a PC!

…

It would’ve been a general protection fault instead =_=

(Thank you, Microsoft.)

This is about KOTOR2. I am just about the last person on the Internet to play this game, so none of what I’m going to write will surprise you. Especially not this first part:

Woah Nelly is that game messed up. I almost wrote fubar, but hopefully it isn’t. One of the reasons I’ve been loathe to write this post is because my good friend Ruben has been harrassing me about my impatience ever since I announced my intent to start the game. I was gonna wait until Gizka (back there) finished their work to restore the game to coherence, but I just couldn’t wait any longer. I’ve had almost everything about the game spoiled already, and now I just want to play more KOTOR, dammit. But maybe… maybe Ruben was right. Maybe it would have been worth waiting for Gizka.

It seems like a really rushed game. Maybe I’m just noticing because I’ve already heard so much about how rushed it was, but it just doesn’t seem done. The areas are a little too empty, the quests a little too straight-forward, and the worlds are just a tad less detailed than I’d expect. Most of all, there are some really bad design choices that undoubtedly (in fact sometimes certainly) stem from cut material.

The worst one was when the game took the time to ask me about the shape and colour of my character’s old light saber, had another character flaunt the saber in front of me, and then denied me the opportunity to regain it. Apparently there was supposed to be a way to get that saber back, but it was cut due to time restraints. Which makes me mad, really really mad. That, btw, was the same level in which I managed to budge up the game completely in the manner illustrated to the right of this paragraph. All I did was to pick the wrong dialogue node, apparently. I played through that entire level, all the while looking like one big question mark, before starting over and getting better results by picking something else to say.

However, I’ll keep playing. Because I do have a large tolerance for bugs, thanks to TNM, and because the dialogue is some of the deepest, most engaging writing I’ve ever encountered in a game. The debate with Atris in particular was rousing!

Over 4000 brushes and apparently way too many surfaces to light properly, and not only does UnrealEd crash periodically if I dare so much as move the camera without switching to wireframe mode first, now it’s started crashing the goddamn game, shouting enigmatic, vaguely lighting-related, error messages at me as it plummets into those deepest and darkest parts of Windows where programs go to die.

I have to use UnrealEd 2 to do all the geometry and lighting because the BSP routines of UEd1 aren’t sophisticated enough to handle it properly, but I need to use UEd1 to place characters, objects, and pathing because UEd2 isn’t compatible with Deus Ex’ classes. It’s a fucking circus.

And now I can’t even play it anymore. Time to redo the ambient lighting…

At least it looks purdy.

To vent my frustrations, I opened the game again and loaded up the mission armed to the teeth. I killed… everyone. But it didn’t make me feel any better.

Both times, my control scheme settings were reset to default. And I haven’t managed to get anti-aliasing to actually work yet. Also, the game seems choppy in the menus, even though my PC surpasses the recommended requirements. Oh and this is after patching. I haven’t even made it out of that starting room yet.

I love this game already!

Detect drives done. No any drives found.

I’m used to programmers who are horrible at spelling. I’m not sure how it works out, but it’s no rare occurrence to find a horribly spelled and syntaxed comment in otherwise flawless code. They type functions like this up perfectly: else if (((AnimSequence == 'Pickup') && bAnimFinished) || ((AnimSequence != 'Pickup') && !IsFiring())), yet they can’t spell “canister”.

But seriously. When you write something that I have to look at every time I turn on my computer… please get somebody who can spell to check your work afterwards.

Of course that’s a massively crude way to say it, but I arrived at the conclusion about a week or two ago when I was playing Splinter Cell 4: Double Agent and experienced a hilarious situation due to a combination of great AI and horrible timing.

I was hiding in hostile territory, my eyes on the door to a server room I was looking to enter as part of my mission. Inside the server room was an enemy. Outside it, in the antechamber where I was hiding, was another enemy, looking for a screwdriver. The guy on the outside finally found the screwdriver and made to enter the server room; but at the same time, the guy in the server room was planning to leave.

They reached the door simultaneously and as the entering man tried to open it, it bumped against the man on the inside and was blocked. The guy outside proclaimed “Something’s blocking the door!”, drew his gun, and warned: “This door’s going down.” Then he kicked in the door with the predictable result that it burst open, hitting the other guy directly in the face, and throwing him back into the server room, unconscious. The man on the outside then entered the room carefully, discovered his limp ally and shouted horrified “We got a man down!”

My cover blown, the whole facility on the lookout for me, and all my trust with the terrorist organization that I was infiltrating gone, I loaded and tried again. This time the timing was different, the man in the server room had time to leave before the man outside found his screwdriver, and the game continued.

This would have never happened with a pre-scripted AI. A scene such as this would’ve been meticulously timed in a game such as Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R., but in Splinter Cell, the AI is actually scripted to respond realistically (within the scope of the game world) to the environment. If a door is blocked, he kicks it down. If the light in a room is suddenly turned off or a door left open, he carefully goes to investigate (but never carefully enough, because it is impossible to be careful enough when opposing Sam Fisher). If an enemy in a Splinter Cell game finds one of his allies rendered unconscious, he will wake the fallen man up. The man on the outside in the scene described above acted correctly to overcome the hindrance he encountered; unfortunately he had no sense of context, so a problem arose.

That, and it was kind of annoying that he saw fit to blame his idiocy on me, but that didn’t make the situation any less hilarious.

It goes without saying, the more advanced – the more intricate, responsive, and flexible – an artificial intelligence is, the more prone to error it becomes. To Ubisoft’s credit, this is the only example of AI complications I have encountered in the game, and I am currently on the last level (which is a piece of pure narrative brilliance, but I won’t get into that here, just buy the game!). I will not hesitate to name the AI of Splinter Cell 4 the most impressive artificial intelligence I have ever seen in a game – if not the most flawless and immersive. Stealth games place high demands on the AI, and SC4 delivers.

It also looks beautiful.

My mum has taken 3 days off surrounding the weekend, starting yesterday and ending Wednesday when I take off for Slagelse. Every time my mother takes days off, the principles of gender equality that I was brought up with are damaged a little. It’s just so nice to wake up to a good breakfast and have somebody make me warm sandwiches when I forget to eat lunch (and I always forget to eat when I’m home alone). I gradually begin to understand the appeal of housewives. Luckily, my upbringing always triumphs in the end; I would never dream of demanding that she makes me food, I’m just lucky she’s so concerned about my health when I fail to eat on my own.

Maybe when I get rich I’ll hire somebody to make me food. That way I could get what I like so much without oppressing anybody.

On an unrelated note, I like to fix bugs in software. It’s really great to find, report, and then squash them one by one. I guess that’s why I’ve been spending almost all my time on it for the past 2 weeks. I did find the time to watch the last 3 episodes of Hellsing a few days ago, though. I would agree with Torsten that the series is all about style over substance. It was extremely well made, and I especially loved the evil smiles; rarely have I seen evil smiles look quite so evil. However, the story wasn’t particularly good, and I was never really very concerned about what happened to any of the characters; especially Alucard the super-vampire was overpowered to say the least. Even when his body was utterly destroyed he still survived.

I also watched Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence with my mother a few days ago. The visuals blew me away. The mix of hand-drawn and computer generated animation was just so beautiful that I wanted to print out screenshots of every scene in the movie and use them as wallpaper for my room. Torsten pointed out that all the aesthetics are basically irrelevant to the story, but I think that’s just him being over-critical. Since when must there be a point to making things look good? So long as story is good, and I think it was. Not as good as the first Ghost in the Shell, but it made me think and that’s the important part. Plus, the combat sequences were, for the lack of a better word, awesome. Although any movie in which somebody gets his brain HACKED and runs amok in a convenience store automatically gets a star in my book.