Tweaks plus tune-ups.

An interesting week. I spent most of my time last week tuning the AI system in the game. It isn't ready yet, so the work goes on. Beta 0.0.3 was a feature freeze and I hope to wind down the coding work on the game in a couple of week and aim for a code freeze in about 20 days. We still have to do bulk of the game levels so that will take up some time (even after the freeze).

We still have some issues with ATI h/w and DirectX. I shouldn't even be mentioning OpenGL because ATI OpenGL drivers are written by armatures and are broken in every place. The strange thing is some card models work perfectly and on others the errors are totally bizarre. I am tired of ATI OpenGL combination. So much so, I am officially asking the beta testers not to test with the OpenGL driver on ATI h/w. (Sorry if this sounds like a rant!) Anyways, I hope to solve all pending issues before the code freeze.

Progress has been slow on the beta testing front. One of the testers was preoccupied with some work on other issues not relating to the game. I am sure we will pick up the pace this week. No major issues yet, so that is good news (, or no news) too. Some feedback on the gameplay, but nothing related to crashes and GPFs.

Problems with my site on freehostia continue. Can't do too much about that. Moving the site to a permanent location will probably be done after the code freeze. Probably, maybe before that, lets hope it will be done before that. In the meantime have patience if the current site is down.

Gameplay and Hardware.

The entire of last week was spent ironing out gameplay issues. Small annoying things that could have just put-off a game player are being addressed. Some bugs also remain. There are a few, and there always are, which have taken a special nagging status. The worst ones are the ones that happen infrequently and I am currently working on exactly such a one, but I think most issues should be resolved soon.

Some adjustments are also being made to the game defaults so it can run on older hardware. How old, that is a question which will be answered when the game is finished :)). I think, the game should run on a FX 5200 (or equivalent) and above. I found that most on-board Intel cards are pathetic, your best bet on them is DirectX, you can forget about OpenGL. Lucky for us the game can run using either API. I am trying my best to support Intel cards, but new issues keep coming up all the time. NVIDIA cards have good support for both DirectX and OpenGL, no problems there. ATI cards can have broken OpenGL support on some models, but good DirectX support all round.

Too many problems with the website

There is just too many problems with the website on freehostia. The site is down for almost half a day now. Too much frustration! The entire photo gallery is out of commission because of that. I will probably move to a permanent website very very soon. I have had it with free hosts!

Yes I am still here.

I have been working on the all the small issues of beta lately, plus I have been involved in issues on other fronts as well. But the work is ON smoothly. We are planning on adding more levels to the game just to give it more play time. I will give all the details about that very soon.

I know I haven't kept my promise about uploading a video, the fact is I haven't managed to acquire a good capture software. Lame excuse! I know, sorry. But I have been a little bit busy finishing small issues which I think should have a higher priority. I will capture a video soon, I promise.

Good news on the web-page front. We will be having our own site soon. So no more outage problems. The current website has had too many outages in the recent past. I am sorry.

A couple of people have been asking me when the game will be out, I just want to say soon. I have prepared an FAQ for all that stuff including a brief on what the game is and what it will take to run it. You can catch the FAQ here.

Small 3D technology preview.

I have posted a small technology preview about the Doofus 3D game on my personal blog. I don't want to cram this blog (, which only blogs progress of the game) with boring technology details so I have just placed a link to it. It's some information on how lighting and shadows are done in the game. Nothing too much, I have tried to keep everything simple and have tried to keep the details to a minimum. Check it out, its something new and exiting not just a bland progress update.

Meanwhile problems with freehostia continue so you may experience downtimes, please be patient. I am working on a permanent solution to the problem.

Personal and technical blog.

Whew! Two weeks of little work.

The past two weeks have had only a fraction of the work from my side. Why? First an attack of influenza, that was bad enough, took 7 straight days off my work schedule. That wasn't the end of it, three days ago another bout with the common cold. It's like a double whammy! It's the beginning of the rains here, so such things were expected, but not is such rapid succession. :(

I have been up against some issues from the beta. Bugs like, levels ending prematurely, jerks in the gameplay and things like that. No critical bugs like crashes or GPFs. So that is great. Actually it isn't, small bugs are notoriously difficult to solve and you end up pulling your hair over them. Damm, some of them are really getting on my nerves. I have been on and off on one for about 2 days now.

The game will have an official website soon. I am in the process of finalizing some business side of things and that has kept me busy too. I am having a very bad experience with freehostia. The site has been down 6 to 7 times a day. That is just way too bad. I have had it with free hosting sites. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I will have a permanent website and I can move all the development related progress over there.