It’s one of those things I love: You start with a simple premise, in my case “let’s reduce the amount of synchroonous loading in Anarchy Online”, and end up with weeks of work. The reason: tentacles.

A lot of AO code doesn’t like when you load a mesh asynchronously, so especially when new characters get into your vicinity, their meshes are loaded in the same frame (well, not exactly true, there’s some throttling). This is mostly because the animation code really hates not having a mesh, but also the special effects code and some other bits and bobs. While looking at that, I noticed that in other places, people don’t use the asynchronous resource-loading thread, mostly because it is hard to use, and got added as an afterthought. It was clearly time for some refactoring.

So I started not with more synchronous loading, but with changes to the Resource Loader itself. The first test I made gave 25% faster loading times for synchronous loading, so even with no change to the rest of the system, I would increase framerate for those laggy you-entered-a-new-zone moments.

So I rewrote that, and also changed the API. This is where the trouble started. Changing the Resource Loader API meant chnging a lot of classes that were inheriting from the Callback class to using a separate callback class (which lets me then also load objects that did not previously inherit from that class go through the Loader. I’d need a diagram to explain this properly). So suddenly, nothing compiled, and I was in the middle of rewriting those classes when I decided that the callback mechanism was a bad design in the first place, and that I rather wanted to use ACE_Future objects and cleer notification. Around this point, I also decided to make meshes load _only_ asynchronous from now on, because the ACE_Future objects will allow me to make the transition between now and fully async loading as smooth as I want it – well, or so I hope. I haven’t even started fixing the mesh class.

And if you go through that much code, you see all those things that are bugged. Dangling pointers, bad design, inefficiencies. And I just can’t let those be, so I end up taking a detour of one, two hours to fix some smaller thing. It spreads. And now it’s the weekend, and I can’t tear myself away from the machine, although I have no hope of getting this stuff to work any time in the near future…

I love my job 🙂

After the tsunami, the first thing I checked for in the news was whether one of my favourite writes was okay. Today I found confirmation that Arthur C. Clarke and his family are okay. He’s suffered some material damage, but no personal loss. The email mentioned in the article is here

Which reminds me that I need to finish reading Time’s Eye.

The Dreamfall website has been updated with some new screenshots.

Eressea didn’t run this morning. It looks like the new code I made for this year’s christmas gift causes some endless loop in the routine loading the data file. Remember: Code made at 2:30 in the night does not stand a good chance of running the first time you use it. Which is bad news for the rewrite of the movement code I did during the night from saturday to sunday.

Work has been slow this last day before the holidays, so I’ve been looking at the profiler for lack of other really pressing tasks – well, I have tasks, but I depend on people who have already gone on vacation, so I can’t work on those. Anyway, the profiler tells me what I already know, we need to reduce the number of synchronous resource loads on the client even more if we want to get a more steady framerate (duh), and it’s a shame I lost the code I once wrote for that. And a shame that I won’t have time to do it when we’re all coming back after the holidays 🙂 Because there’s going to be something more important to do then, I’m sure.

“Free” is the magic word.

In just one day, we’ve had 15,000 downloads of the Anarchy Online software through bittorrent. And our ftp link has been maxed out for the last 24 hours, I have no idea how many downloads that adds up to.

AO is the most popular link at suprnova with over 7000 peers at the time of this writing, beating even all the pirated stuff that’s usually found there. Bittorrent is cool – as a protocol, that is. That it’s usually associated with piracy doesn’t mean it can’t be used for good, just like email is not a bad thing simply because 90% of my mails are spam.

I’m digressing, though. Interesting times, indeed. The newbie areas are full of people, we run lots of instances of them, and Alex said he hasn’t seen this kind of crazyness since the launch day. Except this time the servers aren’t going down all the time 🙂

Meanwhile I’ve been working on version 15.8 (fixed some exotic item code) and 15.9, where I was getting really tired of the launcher code and thinking of merging it with the main game into a single executable. If I find the time, that is.