How things are going with the new update
Hi all! Last week, Olvand v10.1 was released, and 100 new players were invited. Everything seems to be going really well and I've got no reports of crashing games so far, so I'm really happy. Two new groups of 100 players will be invited this weekend and the next one respectively.
An Olvand subreddit
Inviting new players usually means I spend a lot of time with my inbox, answering questions and helping people. This wave is no different. However, while working my way through the emails, I suddenly noticed an email I received serveral months ago. It was by VirtualFall, and he said: 'Hi, i created a subreddit for Olvand: Reddit.com. My response was, naturally: 'Awesome! I will mention it on the blog next week.'. Whoops, I completely forgot about that, sorry VirtualFall!. So here you go, have a look at /r/Olvand everyone! I personally think Reddit is one of the best ways to share content on the internet right now, so I really hope this subreddit takes off. If you're a Redditor, why don't you go share some of your outfits or effective gun setups over there?
The most worrying bug in the history of Olvand: solved
The weeks before the last release I've been a bit quiet, because I was busy fixing bugs, which is not that interesting to write about. If you've been following Twitter or Facebook, however, you know that something exciting DID happen - at least, something exciting to me. From next week on I'll start telling you about all the new things I'm working again, but I want to use this week's blogpost to share that moment with you.
You might remember that [I was panicking a little bit] about the fact that I since I switched my graphics engine to Glux, a number of players couldn't player anymore. As everything worked on my machine, I thought this was almost impossible to fix: the only way I could test whether a small change in my code solved (or partly solved) the problem was to send it to hundreds of testers, and hope someone would send me a crashlog back. You can imagine that would have taken ages.
And to make things even worse, there seemed to be more than one problem, and I only had very vague ideas of what they were: a number of players reported that their machines told them the game was 64bit while their operating system was 32bit (you can run 32bit programs on 64bit systems, but no the other way around), but one player reported that 'updating video card drivers' solved the problem. Weird.
But then, on a lucky day, I noticed by accident that my girlfriend was using a 32bit system! Hurray, that meant I could probably use her laptop to reproduce at least one of the problems! She grumpily let me try, and indeed... a crash. I looked around in my code and my toolkit, and discovered that I indeed accidently used some 64bit parts. I replaced those with their 32bit counterparts, recompiled the game, and sent it my girldfriends pc. With shaking hands I navigated to the Olvand folder, and hit enter to try again, and ... another crash.
Dissappointed, I almost wanted to give up and go do something else, when I suddenly noticed that the error message had changed. And as the programmers among you probably know, changing errors = progress! Apparently, I had solved the 64bit issues, and now stumbled upon the second problem, the video card issues! In other words, I could use my girlfriend's laptop to solve not only one, but both of the problems. All right :D!
The video card problem turned out to be an ever harder one, as the error was related to some part of OpenGL that's barely documented. But I knew it had to do something with 'old drivers' and stuff, and after hours and hours of Googling I found a forum question+answer that also seemed to suggest this. Apparently, I had used a number of functions that were added to OpenGL only recently, and older video card drivers didn't know about them yet. Or to be more precise, the NAMES of the functions had changed, but the functionality itself has existed for quite some time under other names. Since these older names are still known to newer video cards, the solution was simply changing the new names to the old names, and voila:
I've never been so happy with a simple screenshot before. Olvand will work on most computers again :D.
If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].
sweet