The Daily Click

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Project Started:	18th August, 2009	Last Update:	29th May, 2011
Project Owner:	MongMaster	Project Members:
Project Type:	Side Scrolling Shooter	Project Progress:

Bit of a change of plan...

Posted 23rd May 11, by MongMaster

Almost free... one more university assignment to go, and I'll actually have time to devote to ULSG.

However, there is one teensy tiny gigantic problem that's been bugging me for quite a while now.

Most of the following is just me thinking out loud, so if you don't really want to read through it all, I'll sum it up here: I'm a bad coder and I'm thinking of finishing V13 quickly, and starting V14 from scratch. If you want to know exactly why, read on.

The code is nightmarishly bad, and in desperate need of refactoring. Events are everywhere, some features don't appear in all modes... heck, I haven't even made use of global events or global objects! I didn't know those things existed when I was first developing ULSG, and now it's haunting me. :/ Just goes to show how important it is to plan things out, but I was young and foolish back then.

The code doesn't only affect how efficiently I can work, though. Somewhere in there, it's having a massive effect on the gameplay, and I don't quite understand why. On my PC, it's fine everywhere, but on slower computers (like the ones at uni), the framerate is pretty bad. The weird thing is, the framerate ONLY drops in Quadrillion Mode, BEFORE you hit the score cap. If you play a Challenge, it's fine. Or, if you hit the score cap in Quadrillion Mode, the framerate immediately shoots to 60. This confuzes me - I can't really think of what it could be.

So, I'm thinking of getting all the current features completed and releasing that as V13, and then almost completely scrapping the code and starting again from scratch for V14. This means that V13 won't include everything I wanted to add, and may have some quite annoying issues on lower-spec machines. However, you'll be able to play V13 earlier, V14 will be much better, and if you're a fan, you'll have something else to look forward to.

If I DON'T do this, though, V13 will have all the planned features, but it will take a while yet, and might still have some issues on release. Hmm.

It's a pretty difficult decision for me, but I'm probably going to stick with my gut, and get V13 finished off quickly. I don't like half-finishing a project, but I think it's better this way - the less I do, the less I'll have to scrap and recode when I start V14.

Does anyone have any thoughts? They would be welcomed muchly.

For now, though, I'll try to get to grips with my old code, and see what needs to be done.

In other news, the MySQL databases which store high scores for ULSG and ULSG: Overdrive have vanished (again), and the data was lost. It's a free service, so I can't really complain, but it's still annoying.

I've gotten myself a different host, and I've modified the PHP scripts so they point to the new server, so you should be able to submit your ULSG: Overdrive high scores now.

Sorry if you had a ultra-high score or anything.