First, a bit of scheduling news: the monthly update of Clockwork Empires, revision 40, will be released next week. Due to E3 and a giant Steam sale there’s not a lot of point in releasing anything this week.
Last time I wrote a blog post, I had written half of the Clockwork Empires codebase in order to fix various issues with autosaves being reported by users. Naturally, these things never happen when I am playing the game; instead, we got DMP files and sorted through them. (I wrote a little in house tool to process these for me; now I can run a batch file and it runs all the DMP files we get through a little script which automatically outputs their call stacks and other pertinent information.)
The moment of truth.
To try and fix these issues, I rewrote the entire jobs system in order to move everything into nice, flat arrays, and to get rid of direct references to pointers. My original hope was that this would fix the save game crashes we were experiencing, which were due to various instances of dead pointers to jobs being left in Lua space. Well, it fixed *some* of those crashes. Once Revision 39A came out, we got a bunch more crash reports: various people’s assignments were crashing, due to assignments being held in Lua after they were dead. Well, it wasn’t part of my original plan, but they got the same treatment – assignment handles are now first class citizens, and we can now actually tell if an assignment handle exists or not, and is deleted or not. Starting from Revision 39B, all the workshop assignments were also moved over to a new system where they were controlled by C++, and we were able to remove huge chunks of broken Lua code. Now the workshops were starting to feel good, in a way that they hadn’t felt since… well, since we first put them in – but yet, we still had save game crashes.
