Tuesday, June 20, 2006

SpaceRocks! update (finally)

Tonight, I finally had the energy to work on my computer some at home. And, since the beta build of Flight Simulator X kept dying on me before I could take off, I decided to do some code work.

A while back, I finally got around to converting the SpaceRocks! code to use a high performance timer (the one included with the DirectX SDK, slightly modified), instead of just using a simple frame counter.

This is a Good Thing™. And a difficult thing. In game programming (at least my game programming), I have found the need for several constants. I originally tweaked these constants to get decent playability (like in version 0.0.8). After switching to the high perf timer, I had to re-tweak nearly every constant. So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few coding sessions.

In addition to tweaking the game settings, to achieve some measure of playability, I also tweaked the particle code. Finally, I am fairly happy with the particles, and how they behave. That was much more of a frustration than I thought it would. Over time, I will continue to play with the particles. Specifically, I plan to change them so they attenuate over time, and I am going to randomize the colors somewhat. I’m planning on specifying a base color, and creating particles whose colors are close to that base, but not exact, with probably a few white ones thrown in for fun.

Lots of good stuff, for a couple of hours worth of work.

Oh yeah, cruisecontrol.net is working just fine. I was having more source control issues, but they seem to have cleared up (magically). Actually, now that I think about it, the computer was rebooted due to a power outage. I bet that cleared some cache somewhere. I had been making changes to the config file, and relying on the service being restarted to apply the changes. I wonder if the hard reboot forced some changes to be applied that were being cached before.

It’s actually building right now, as I type this. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Question for Eric Sink: Do I need to purchase a seperate Vault license for the cc.net service?

4 comments:

Cullen Waters said...

You know, I read an article about the stopwatch, and it didn't even register. Guess that will be my next refactor.

Anonymous said...

Short answer: No, you probably do not need a separate Vault license for cc.net.

Long answer: Each Vault license allows one active named user account. If your build process needs to have its own named user account, then you need a license. But I doubt that to be the case.

Cullen Waters said...

I guess my question was poorly stated. From the SourceGear point of view, is it allowable for my build process to use the same named account as I do?

The build process is only performing a glv, and doesn't check anything in. Generally, it runs while I am not working with Vault.

Thanks for the quick answers.

Anonymous said...

SourceGear has no opinion on what consenting adults or build machines might do when sharing the same Vault account.