It’s been a while hasn’t it? A proper, full fledged Dev Blog about the game. And it’s for the currently available client too! I know, it’s insane isn’t it? Grab a drink and some snacks, cause this is gonna be a longer one.
A New Way of Loading
The days of the launcher and old loading screen are gone, here are the days of a proper loading screen which will connect after it has loaded everything. And it supports (partial) threading too! I’ve put a lot of work into implementing this feature into the language about 2 years ago, so I dug up the old code, rewrote and refactored it and included it into Sirius Online. And voila, loading times are one tenth of what they were before!
Image: Click Me to View
If only there was not this bug in the language…
Bugs in the Language
If I only stumbled onto this sooner, I wouldn’t have attempted anything crazy. But as fate would have it, it had to appear as I was testing a new feature. The bug: Blitz3D is internally failing to keep track of objects it itself creates – memory allocated to certain objects suddenly would no longer be referenced or used – it just vanished. This affected all types of objects in Blitz3D: Texture, Models, Sounds, Music, Fonts, Buffer, Banks, Strings.
If you ask me, I think this comment from the author of the language itself (Mark Sibly) fits best here:
WHAT THE FUCK WAS I ON?!?!?!?
I’ve been working on fixing this – but as you may know, reading another mans code is like riding a bike for the first time. It takes time and at some point you’ll start to understand what happens internally. I managed to get the original code to compile and removed the dependency on DirectPlay, so now on to fix that critical Bug.
Anyway, on to the next thing:
A New Branch Appears
If you paid close attention to our steam depots, you could have noticed that a passworded branch named “unreal” appeared. I’ve been uploading test builds to it that only developers can see for now, but soon I’m going to invite a few people into this branch – you don’t need to do anything right now. The “unreal” branch is far from done, it’s barely playable and I don’t even have the core game elements down completely.
Initially we’ll invite 25 people into the branch for testing. After we’re sure it runs okay enough, we’ll open it up for everyone and it’ll eventually replace the original client. Be prepared, as you might be one of the few we’ll invite!
Parting Words
I’m sure everyone here is waiting on the new updated version, but please be patient. Play the current version, find and report bugs (but don’t duplicate reports, use the search function) so that we don’t end up porting what was a bug into the unreal engine version.
As always, thanks for reading. Until the next time I wake up from code induced coma.
Read on Digital Dawn Studios: http://www.digitaldawnstudios.com/2016/07/16/dev-blog-the-old-and-the-new/