Monday, March 31, 2008

Came from Alabama with a laptop on my knee

Ooops -- last night, I encountered an embarrassing bug in Jangaron: If you chose the same color for multiple players, a crash of one of them claimed the lives of all same-colored players!
I found the bug when trying to reconstruct the original scene from the movie, where all good players feature slightly different red/orange/something colors, while the bad guys are uniformed with blue light cycles. Not too bad, to get rid of all bad guys by crashing one of them, but not too fair, either (hey, good guys always have to be fair, but at least they don't have to brag about their ingenious plan to rule the world until eventually, they are fragged...). Another thing I noticed was that I really have to add a team mode.
Of course, I fixed the bug as soon as I could, i.e. on my way to work. Although I don't live in Alabama, riding public transport trains with my laptop (well, the company's laptop) gives my the opportunity to code on Jangaron. In Hamburg, when using a Laptop in public transport, you are still met with puzzled gazes and sometimes even snide remarks, mostly by folks who one minute ago were busy scuffing their thumbs on their mobile's knobby keys.
The bug was, as most often, caused by over-optimization combined with sloppiness: The color was a shared object (aliasing), and its alpha value was modified, although Color objects are intended to be immutable. More over, the alpha value is used as (the only) indication of a dying player. For the time being, I just fixed the first issue, but will care about the others later.
If you played the game before and still experience the bug after reloading the page, try to clear your browser cache.
Have fun!

2 comments:

  1. yup........ i also had the same experience one day but i could be able to skip the thing out of my sight so it wasnt a problem for me ...so pls try tat...
    sathyam
    alabama drug rehab

    ReplyDelete
  2. Do you want to indicate that I am a computer addict? Oh, come on! Well. Hmm. Reflecting on it, maybe you are right. Too bad Alabama is far, far away...

    ReplyDelete

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