Today, I finally slightly retooled the admin system to allow for admin logins on servers, and also admin logins for local client, which means that all of the commands that have previously been disabled can now be enabled if you type in /ruinthefun (local only). This will be ridiculously helpful for modders and such. I think we might look into segregating characters where admin has been used and where it hasn’t been in the future into different universe directories.

Also, I fixed a few UI and API bugs. The find random button was allowing you to leave the system when you technically could not leave the system.

I spend a good chunk of my day doing an interview. We’ve been interviewing various people for the programming position on the Pirate game.

Hey there, I spent most of today writing and configuring methods for making shields sound different when you perfect block and when they break. They also make particles on perfect block and break now.

I also wrote come code to suppress the shield while invulnerable and very slightly after (2 frames), in order to prevent tanking the first hit of a stream (that can hit you 2 or 3 times) in order to perfect block the rest of them, (essentially cheesing the system.)

I also discussed changing part of the lower level windowing system with kyren, and spent some time making sure she understood that area of the code, because she’s working on the AI stuff.

Late update for the coder tonight. George left so quickly because he wanted to play Mario Kart 8.

Today, I primarily worked towards solving a few perf issues as a palette cleanser before diving back into shields.

I fixed a deadlock scenario with where we weren’t holding a mutex before signaling on a condition variable to shutdown worker threads in our assets system.

While I was in the neighborhood of Assets, I revisited the locking behavior of our assets system. Namely, because Asset reading is nearly entirely reads, and never ever writes except for loading, we didn’t strictly need a single user Mutex to lock it. So I wrote a readers/writer lock. Then I spent the rest of the day debugging, testing for correctness, and exposing bugs elsewhere. Unfortunately, most of these issues were exposed on Windows, so I didn’t stream most of the day. Sorry stream peeps. :(

With the new readers/writer lock we start up noticably faster, which is awesome. There’s still large, low hanging perf issues in the new tile rendering code, which I’m planning on turning my baleful gaze to some point next week, either before or after the shield stuff.

Have a wonderful weekend.