A pensive moment...Wow. It's certainly been a while since I last blogged, so I'll try and make amends without going overboard.
The Christmas wind-down is upon us, the fanfest is over, the merger announced, the patch out. This is never to say that things can't get lively around the office - just this week there's been two incidents of people running around screaming and pulling their hair out that I've been involved in; One has involved our attempts to sort out forum portrait rendering, and the other was a nasty surprise with billboards flipping out and causing hideous lag.
The billboard problem was one of the more interesting ones - it started with client crashes that we traced back to the loading of broken JPG files, which were ones that we were downloading from the internet. People have been crashing at gates because they download a broken jpg like the Concord adverts, or bounty portraits, then attempt to load it. Not much we could do about this directly, since the crashes have nothing to do with our code.
We attempted to fix this by removing some of the images that we thought might be causing the issue, but despite testing this first, we didn't spot that doing this could lag out the client completely (It would be fairly easy for testing of this to not hit cases like that, with things like cache state and the method of persuading the client that the files were absent differing from the real responses). As soon as we got a reproducible case here at CCP, I took a look and guessed what was going horribly wrong, so we put back the images. This should have fixed the abnormal lag, but didn't help with the images causing crashes.
We're now at the stage where we're working through some changes to how we load JPGs to solve that issue, and looking into fixing the change that messed up how http downloads work which was causing it. We hope to have a client patch out as soon as possible. (A client patch for this issue is being published on 21 December. ~kieron)
The Graphics Cell has been on a hiatus from our standard fare of ripping things out of the engine and rewriting them, having taken to fire fighting bugs like those, and trying to track down memory leaks in the client. Modeling on the ship revamp has continued apace, and we've reached the point that every single ship is now either completed, or in the approval process. It will be some time before the models make an appearance in EVE, as in-house processing and work on the graphics engine still need to be done.
We've also managed to solve one of the biggest issues that we've faced in our new office - we need to build really big and beefy monster machines for development, beyond the limits of our power supply. That's been rewired, so we can switch things on without worrying quite so much about the whole office powering down.
While PrepH runs interference, I'm trying to get back to dealing with issues that will allow us to move ahead again, among which is getting rid of our old exporter plugin for Maya, and switching over to a nice, modern SDK for a portable format. I'll be happy, because I'll be able to potter away at programmer art in any one of a good number of modeling programs. You should see my "giant space cube-like object".
I'll leave you with my best wishes for a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, if you happen to celebrate them. If not, best wishes to you and yours during the Christmas. Oh, and I think I promised everyone some remodeled Minmatar stuff a while back...
Author: Redundancy
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Source: eve-online.com | devBlog
Description: EVE: The Second Genesis, is a massively multiplayer, online, persistent world game. Players are spaceship captains cruising around a distant universe, trading, fighting and communicating with other players
