I’m beginning to remember why I didn’t want to do a status update post every week when we started this website.
It’s that what gets accomplished in one week tends to be easily summarized in a few words. For example this week I got projectiles working completely and explosions working partially (unless being able to walk on compressed air waves is a feature in which case explosions are done), and while someone who does game development would think that’s a reasonably productive week when combined with bug crushing. Those of you who are not developers are likely thinking, ‘that doesn’t sound like much. Why didn’t he do more? And where are the screenshots.’
Well the screenshots are coming … eventually. I could post some box2D debug renders, but that’s just a bunch of rectangles outlined with different colors. Ahh the days when someone around here did artwork.
Speaking of Box2D I’ve got more things to say about it. Some good some bad.
The Good
I used Box2D to implement the explosion. I think it is fantastic and reasonably straight forward now that I’ve done it once.
The Bad
Things get stuck at the seams of butted objects; not always but often enough to be annoying. This is a known issue and is supposedly being worked on. Currently suggested is don’t place objects contiguously. This means that loading a world tile by tile is a no go.
On first implementations of things I frequently pass bad data or make inappropriate calls to the Box2D world. This is a normal part of the development process however since I’m developing on java and Box2D runs in native libraries I get lovely unhelpful error messages like.
Process finished with exit code 255 (Box2D, java, libgdx)
Which I got when I tried to add a new object while the world was stepping.
And
EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005), AL lib: (EE) alc_cleanup: 1 device not closed – (Box2D, java, libgdx)
[Update] which was caused by attempting to address(dispose of) a body that had been disposed of.
I also had an equally unhelpful error when I disposed of a shape before instantiating a fixture based on that shape. I’m too lazy to reproduce this error so no console capture for that one.
Since these crashes happen in native code that means that lost objects aren’t cleaned by the java garbage collector, and it’s entirely possible they sit around causing a memory leak. yay. Oh wait that other thing, booo.