Yesterday was a productive Sunday of game development... until it wasn't.
I got a ton of stuff done in the morning and early afternoon, here's a glimpse at the list:
Selecting enemies with the left mouse button (this introduced a bug with selections when also using tab targeting. I need to store the current target and clear it if a new one is acquired. Then set the new one to be the 'current target'.
Setup the navmesh in the 'Hello World' level for AI movement functionality
AI now aggros and chases the player when they enter their perception radius
Dragging UI windows to new locations now functions (figured this out but dealing with a scaling issue in the main HUD in the On Drop override. This will remain a bug in the backlog as I don't want to waste much time on this small issue.
Adjusted the 'pull cam' to see behind you quickly while pulling mobs without reorienting your camera (hotkey: B)
After accomplishing all this I was feeling good and took a break to watch the Eagles game (spoiler alert: we got destroyed by the Giants). As someone who has been humbled by giants more than once in my gaming days, I can relate. Here's to a long corpse run and deep contemplation about what we've gotten ourselves into.
At halftime (24-0 Giants) I decided to turn the game off and go back to development.
Except that was not going to happen. Not today.
PC Load Letter? WTF does that mean?!
My PC started to act very strangely. I believe I may have ran out of disk space at some point temporarily because my machine starting lagging pretty badly and then straight up froze in place. This has not happened since I built this PC in 2020. So naturally I was concerned. I rolled up my sleeves and went back to my bag of IT tricks to resurrect the beast.
But everything I tried resulted in the same maddening result: a slow, unresponsive boot and lack of use of key functionality like the Windows search bar and CTRL+ALT+DEL.
I knew I was in trouble but didn't know how bad it was. I immediately booted into safe mode and spent the next 2 hours troubleshooting the issue to no avail. At one point I ripped apart my whole office looking for my OEM Windows 10 install disk so I could reset the PC. But it was nowhere to be found as I must have misplaced it.
Needless to say a good day turned bad... and quick. I spent my time troubleshooting 'til almost midnight and only managed to get it to boot to the desktop and lag like crazy.
I decided to call it a night and tackle this in the morning with a clearer head.
In the morning I ran diagnostics and system cleaning commands to make sure my machine was in good shape. After more boots to the BIOS than I care to mention, I was able to get a boot to Windows with all my files in tact. I immediately started furiously backing up my content to an external drive (and thank God the game is stored in the cloud on Perforce!)
After all my files were backed up, I attempted a full system reset, which appears to have worked. Chrome was still acting funny so I had to backup my bookmarks and fully uninstall/reinstall the browser itself. Things appear to be in working order now.
So, after all that, here I am to finally post "yesterday's blog post".
I started learning more about the World Partition feature, loading and unloading regions of the game world, and managing LODs and distance field meshes.
I am happy with the progress over the last two days, especially since I had to work almost 10 hours today also at my 'day job'.
The most important lesson I learned was that no matter what you do... BACKUP YOUR WORK OFTEN! This could have ended very, very badly. I live to see another battle.
Cheers,
Vinny
Comments