X-Sight Development

Despite a slightly late start this morning, I’m impressed with the way things are going at present.
Still researching on some of the ways to perform some of the functions required by Talking Timepiece, I instead decided to devote most of today’s time working on the virtual pet.
Having fished out the source code and taken a good look, I was appalled at various things, having written most of it midway through last year before I had really learned much about memory management and coding game engines.
First things first. The memory hogging little … well, anyway, I taught it to use 8.5MB rather than 30MB. I forgot that the virtual pet was one of the programs where I loaded in all the sounds at once - not a very memory effective way of managing things.
After that, I worked on the previous bug that had literally puzzled and frustrated me since the end of November last year. The file to which the pet’s status info was written wasn’t overwriting.
All the time I was searching through the code that handled the files to see whether it opened them is append mode rather than overwrite, and all the time the error was staring me straight in the face, if not touching me. It was all to do with the variable that the information was stored in when the data was read that hadn’t been reset and blanked out before reassembling each individual value.
I then concentrated on making sure the array that held all the parameters was synchronised correctly, since the last draft of the program dealt with different parameters for the pet’s emotions, actions and care status.
There were also a few program crashes along the way because I’d forgotten to free the memory used by the audio library, since this was another DirectX to Streamway conversion, so I sorted them out.
Alongside all that were various other minor issues, such as the program beeping when first loaded. All dialog boxes beep when a control is focused, so quite naturally it wants to beep when it loads. Therefore I set a counter that when set to 0 it would stay silent when the first control is reached, if not then continue as normal.
This will prove in useful for the base of a means of configuring the program. If you set it not to give audio feedback when navigating or when performing an action, well, I’ll probably use a boolean value for something like that, as is the programming standard.

Well folks, it’s been a long day at X-Sight Interactive.
After checking to see whether my changes had been saved to my blog, I astonishingly found that my X-Sight hit counter was once again at the mercy of a few lerking dead dogs.
Therefore, I spent hours upon hours messing around with my PHP hit counter, and have now finally got it to back up the count every now and then. Whether it will or can read that data and amend the main count tracking file is a different story … I suppose I’ll see if my hit counter goes down again. If it does, then at least I will no longer have to memorise the number of hits on the date I last checked and make an estimate based on that number.
I’ll be rather unlucky if all four backup counters go ploomph.

Hi folks!
Well, after moving into my snazzy new apartment, some may say on the day of doom, Friday, March 13, and having no internet from above date to today, I have just about been coding my head to breaking point.
I now have what seems to be a stable class for announcing the date and time for Talking Timepiece, as well as some handy new features in Acefire, and a few new projects on the go that are hush hush, at least for a while until I have an idea as to whether they will work out or not.
Now, with a stable internet connection and a laptop on its last legs, I should just about be able to grind my laptop to a few more crashes and halts while I continue coding and corrupting my executables until my computer decides to behave.
Rest assured that I am now spending a lot more time, not only coding now, but managing the heavy list of projects. Now having a standard 9 while 5 routine rather than a do as and when, it will enable, at least I hope, better productivity and reliability. This will include frequent checks of the X-Sight website counters, links, etc., as well as the software side.
On that positive note, I’ll just go clickity quack, and post this rambling little entry for y’all to see.

Well, getting set up for using WordPress was a pain, inexperienced as I am in MySQL database names.
It’s all thanks to Chris Harrington that I was able to get it set up in the first place.
Over the past couple of days, no development has been done, since I have been setting up the blog, as well as making new URL’s for it, in other words, the easy one you can all access it from.
Over the next couple of days, however, I will be attempting to catch up on what time I lost.
I’m going to go clickity beep and submit what I wrote and start coding!