Update - 30 January 2017 - Visible progress ..

This was pretty long week from last post. There was really a lot of issues that were fixed in code. There is still a lot to go but well at least I have some results of my work that I can show you. Prepare:

Yeeee.... I know. It looks almost exactly like any other screen I done so far for editor. But guest what it's not because I replaced some of the icon with new one just for break from debugging...

Yeeee .... still even with that it almost the same thing but running on Linux. So welcome in my reality where I spends hours which resulting with the same stuff on my screen over and over again.

Good news is its slowly coming together and work. This bring some hope for future. Maybe soon I will do some new stuff. But first things I need to do so more fixes because there are still few issues to fix.

Greg

Progress #7 : Two weeks later ...

... Yes, two busy weeks. So let's go to the point: How much project changed in meantime.

My estimations of work was pretty accurate. After two weeks that I spend on porting editor I can for sure say that port is still not finished but at least in usable state which you can see bellow:

But there are still some bugs which will take some time to figure out how to fix them. To give you example how time consuming such a task can be : 

I spend four days tracing why resources weren't released. I were debugging game, writing code for resource tracing and after all that I finally found the source of problem. Of course it wasn't resource system but the difference between Windows and Linux. Atomic functions behave there a little bit different. Change in 2 lines of my low level code, moment of waiting to compile everything and done. Sound simple but it really wasn't. 

But well such a life of programmer. Bugs like this are nice because you have occasion to develop some tools that can be use later. In this case I added code which allowing me to log with callstack: creating / increment of ref counting / decrements of ref counting / destroying for specified resources. Because it was nicely implemented it will stay in code and for sure will help me in future problems.

So you can see game works:

Editor works (Yes I know that drawing area is shifted to right. This is one of bugs that I still don't know why happening and I already spend on it like two days :/)

So I think that if there will be no bigger problems soon I should be able to resume animation task :]

Greg

Progress #6

Writing post that spread on multiple days is interesting experience :] When I started it yesterday I had something like this on my screen when I run the game: 

I started describing what I done and almost finished it. But today I needed to redo it again :] The reason behind it is this view:

Yes: Infinite loading screen :D Good thing about this is that it mean engine is running. 

So what changed in last week : 

One of most important stuff was resolving of problems with make files generation, fixed all linking issue and start game. 

This was so important because I could move to run time errors which shown right away. There were some bugs in platform specific code which I wrote some time ago. I couldn't find them earlier because I didn't had game.

Sadly in meantime of all this migrations I broke some windows stuff. I will be moving right now to recovering windows build to have both platforms functional.

Of course this are just the main stuff but I also still actively working on improving project generator, my Linux workflow and code generally.

From funnier stuff that I done wrong with port:

• Using amount of processes to figure out amount of working threads. There was more than 600 of them so initialization was taking few seconds.
• I don't know why but in few places I done exactly the same made mistake with comparing return types of Linux functions i.e :  

if (stat(a_path, &fStat) == -1) {...}  which should be if (stat(a_path, &fStat) != -1) {...}

What next:

Right now I have few things planned. Fixing windows build, porting editor to Linux and of course animation system. I wont write here details because it would probably lost with time. But you can find full description on new planning page that I added to blog. And like always progress page was updated also.

Summary:

Right now I think everything going nicely. Till now whole porting is great success. It shown some weakness of some engine systems. This is one of the reasons why I started more active development of new file system (I plan to do it from almost half year).

What will come next I don't know but right now I'm satisfy with progress. So Cheers and till next week.

Greg

Progress #5

There was small break in my posting. I took small vacation to rest (I visited Poland). Because of that I done only a little bit of work. Again :] This time like I wrote previously I focused on Linux port.

There were a lot of small changes. Everything to improve my building process and compile Linux version of game (I updated progress page today). Sadly I still resolving issues with linking of libraries, missing symbols and few other things. This will be also my task for next week. I want to finally start working under debugger and try to run game not only fight with basics setup problems. 

If I succeed to run game I will move to building Editor. There is full Qt setup that I need to add to project generator. But well this is future. 

One cookie at a time.

Greg