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30 Jun 07 I love late night breakthroughs!

Every game developer has experienced it some time… You work late into the night, because a) you want to, b) you need to or c) a zombie is holding you hostage.

As the world sleeps around you (well, not technically the world), you clack away at your keyboard trying to make sense of a HUGE bug.

You bite your nails, you procrastinate via surfing the web, you listen to music or you just plainly stare at your screen.

Then you start thinking… Why? Is it because of x? Is it because of y? Hmmm… You obviously debug and debug to find the source of your hiccup.

Nothing…

By now, you have listened through your playlist and scribbled 2 pages worth of problem solving. Even the zombie fell asleep… But you KNOW. The answer is right in front of you. You also know that if you do not catch this bug now, you will have to pay for it, ie no bonus, not meeting a competition deadline or the zombie hacks you with an axe.

And then…

Right in the sweet wee little hours of the night while listening to Oysterhead, you put x and y together and EUREKA! First you want to slap yourself for not seeing it earlier, but then you get too excited. First intentions are to wake whoever lives in your home. You know they most likely dont give a shit, but you, you feel the euphoria of destroying your problem.

Then you go to sleep and dream of trains that look like arrays.

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Koen

Been there, done that, a million times! Sometimes it's amazing how you can miss the most obvious things. You think you're never gonna solve a problem and after hours and hours of wanting to bang your head against a wall, you finally see the light and feel like woohooing. Better not do that, my neighbors wouldn't like that at 2am.

Tr00jg

My game lagged heavily at certain and I just could not figure out why. I changed a whole part of my game only to find out it was not that. After some more devving and finally got to the code that was causing it.

Roach Toaster is turn-based game, so whenever I press Enter, everything happens. It turned out that I had a very inneficient way of targeting enemies. I basically checked through every roach to see if it is behind a wall and then checked if it was the nearest one.

The result was that if I added another unit, the total amount of loops doubled, thus it became unplayable with more than 5 units in the level. >.<

I luckily solved it by 1st finding the nearest one and then checking if it is behind a wall. If it was, I just chucked it out of the array.

Someting like that... It would be hard to understand without actually having the code and game before you. :P

GBGames

Hah, I've dreamt of iterators and for loops. Can you give any details of what the problem was that you solved?

I once had a crash problem only to learn that I had to use a while loop instead of a for loop to iterate through a list to destroy the objects. In the for loop, erase() returned a new iterator to the next item in the list, but then the for loop would increment that iterator, which resulted in crashes when I would try to remove an object that wasn't in the list. I have encountered this crash a few times since then and recognized it for what it was, so the good news is that the experience of staying up that night means I solve the same problem in seconds from now on. B-)

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