Mainly because we are not getting what we hopped out of it.
We found most testers to be extreamly under-zealous, yet more than willing to bash us, as if the free beta copy they were playing was actually the Final 'I-paid-30-bucks-for' copy.
So the majority of testing on the MW will continue as in-person testing sessions, AND choice remote people who have shown good beta testing skills in the past.
But as far as plucking people out of the vast blue sea of GDNet in hopes that they will be good testers, that has come to an end.
If anyone here still wants to be a beta tester, they will need to prove to me, somehow, that they will be a good beta tester.
With that out of the way, we can move on to:
Stuff I've done recently:
My time on MW recently has consisted mainly of bug fixing, and thus far things have gone well.
It seems that we have tamed the savage save-game beast, and it is now working very well.
The Phantom Bug:
Unfortunetly we are experiencing a phantom bug,
it comes without a warning and at different times and crashes the game to the desktop.
Due to the severity I am wagering it is a System-Level bug, and my spider-sense tells me it is the audio adaptor.
The Audio Adaptor
Oh what horror. Everything was wonderful in AudioAdaptor land until a long while back we needed to integrate audio streaming (keeping a bunch of 40 MB PCM wave data files in RAM is not smart =D)
I implemented streaming using multi-threading, and the DirectSound notification system (waiting on HEVENTs), and it's always been flaky.
Somtimes out of the blue, WaitForMultipleObjectsEx will just fail to wait, and at times the adaptor will just cause an illegal exception and die.
So in short, it's got issues.
I am going to implement a new system in accordance with one of the DirectSound articles here in GDNet, which seems to be more efficant and less prone for error (all of the potential synchronization gotchas).
Anyone who has ever worked will filling buffers with raw data, knows the potential hazards of a slight miscalculation.
So for the moment I am going to say the bug is that.
It better be that.
Better not be anything graphical wise.
Or I'll kill it.
Yeah. [grin]
-IV