Planet SoC

Contrary to my previous belief I did actually end up having a week where I spent less than full time working :P. This is a result of a trip to Winnipeg to attend my sister’s high school graduation. Things went well, and I’m sure my sister will appreciate entering a Digital Arts program with a great big Wacom tablet and a new flatscreen monitor.
Coming back to WORK work, my weeks work has largely diverged from the realm of coding and dived head first into debugging. I was a little discouraged when I kicked things off because no bugs seemed to show up. Bu as I played on I began to notice little bugs and inconsistencies that I have since begun tracking. I nipped a few bugs, particularly a bug that let people create units out of thin air , and am now starting to pay close attention to another few.
An unfortunate side effect of spending lots of time playing, and not much time coding, is I can’t really give a day-by-day account of what I accomplished. I’ll indulge tradition with a bullet point list, to keep consistent:
This Week

• Added Colonization messaging to the Colonize order. commit.
• Began more intensive playtesting. Some interesting bugs cropped up:
• Player could abuse the Colonize order to “create” extra units that shouldn’t exist. This problem was fixed by removed an unnecessary test in the code. commit.
• Some times when a player joins a game they can’t see any of the objects they own as “theirs.” This compounds to cause other players planets to appear as their own, and their own planet to appear as someone elses. Ultimately the player can still issue orders on their own planets. This bug seems to also cause a server crash when the game is finished. The procedure to recreate the bug has been noted, but upon using gdb the crash cannot be recreated. Strangely enough this bug only occurs with names like test & test2, but not with test & “afjjlsfd.”
• Read 12 items of Effective C++’s 55 items.
• Rewrote the Risk ruleset wiki entry on the Thousand Parsec Wiki. link. As well I created a “getting started” page on the wiki. link.

As for next week I’ll be continuing down the same path, debugging, playtesting, and other administrative work (such as reading about C++, website work, etc.)