Sprint 17 Complete

Sprint 17 has landed.

It has the new pantones, a few new bricks and a couple of tweaks. The vertex and fragment shaders have been disabled for now but will be back in a future sprint soon. A lot of graphical tweaks are pencilled in for release 19, while I'm expecting to focus on core building and useability for 18.

Sprint 16 Complete... 17 is underway

I can't really tell if 16 is complete or not. Its got an (NPE) crash, but that wasn't found until I said 'finished' so fixing the thing is technically the first part of Sprint 17. It feels horribly wrong to say 16 is complete now I know there is a bug though.

Either way, its heads-down on 16, which is checking/asserting some pointers but I don't have a repro so just can't be sure.

Sprint 16 on its way

Both on its way and well underway.

I've 99% fixed the crash introduced in 15. It was memory leak, schoolboy error I know... Actually it was two memory leaks. One caused by me relying on the garbage collection sweep working, and the other I'm not so sure about. A boost::shared_ptr<> looks like the only reference to my object and that reference is cleared... but the dtor isn't called. In this instance I could 'just simply' not use a shared_ptr and the delete operator would do fine - but I want to get to the bottom of it.

As for the GC... Well, I don't have any GC which kind of explains why it failed. That was an easy fix.

Second to this, building between baseplates is in progress. I can safely add/remove bricks that span two or more baseplates. I think. They don't stream in and out of memory very cleanly, and phantom invisible or intangible bricks are sometimes the result as you move through the world.

However, the fix is to cleanly stitch together the two baseplates - accounting for the bricks that span - and all should be well.

Lastly, aside from a couple of minor points, the Jetpack is getting a little tweak based on some use and feedback. Its getting a cruise-control so you can hover at a constant height. I went through all sorts of physics models for it, and whether or not it should have some sort of limited fuel, propellant etc.. But right now its just going to be pretty much free, unrestricted flight.

Sprint 15 Complete

Sprint 15 is working, folks.

Here is the outline:

Fixed Framebuffer startup issue

Alt-Tab is working

Pressing Enter Twice on the main menu will no longer break the world load

A rare startup (NPE) crash has been fixed

Improved WalkRun movement controller

New Jump/Jetpack

Added config option for spherifynormals and clientradius

Fixed the 'invisible brick' startup bug.

*Very* pleased its over. Time to get cracking on 16.

Sprint 14 Complete

Sprint 14, which contained mainly render optimisations, is complete. Its difficult to hand-on-heart say its totally done but I'm content with the results for now. Vertex Transforms are down, the draw speed it way up, and I've added the first significant command line switches and config options - more will appear now the code to read them is in place.

There are a couple of bugs to wrap up the Pre-Prototype so sprint 15 will be a series of consolidation tasks before mainline features-first development continues. Signing off sprint 14 with a couple of known bugs feels pretty low, but they are the highest priority item in sprint 15 and I'll hit those first.

Other than ensuring stability, I haven't got much planned for sprint 15. There are some physics improvements to make so it'll be a good time to roll those in.