Wish I Was Smarter
August 17th, 2007
Way back when, circa 1988, I had a little game dev. shop called Ironwind Software - gimme a break, I was 22 and figured it would be cool to name my company after an old D&D character. Anyhow. I had a guy who sometimes worked for me but who, either way, usually worked at my house. His name was Bean and Bean was the primary motivator - after a 2 PM hand/mouth trumpeting session heralding the solution of a tricky bug - for me to flip my first condo and get a four bedroom townhouse. The whole place was loaded with cheap desks and machines and more space was needed. Another time Bean had spent a day staring at 6502 in the venerable EDASM when he uttered the immortal words, "I wish I was smarter". Some things are funnier in context but that particular Bon Mot killed me. Bean and I have not kept in touch but he was one of a couple of people I have ever met who could regularily make me laugh until helpless.
Today I wish I was smarter. Wednesday I was debugging Font Fiend when I discovered that every font effect re-render was running more slowly than the previous one. After a publisher diversion yest. morning I was back at it. All day long. I went to bed with no solution but after having posted a half-crazed plea for help on indiegamer.com that suggested that maybe malloc under windows runs a background process thus causing increasing slowdown after many mallocs. I was desperate and clearly grasping at straws. I eventually hooked up my regular memory stuff that does one huge malloc at startup and then self manages memory and found that the problem was still there. No mysterious windows nonsense here. Went to bed still baffled, woke up Jennifer 5 minutes later (oblivious to my problems she had fallen asleep) when I told her I knew what the problem was. My font renderer has to expand each sprite when certain effects, like glow and shadow, are applied and I was doing this to the raw render which meant every iteration that didn't involve the font being re-built meant the base graphic for each character was growing. Ooops.
That's about it - time to implement a fix and enjoy our last 3 days before piling into the van and beginning our trek for the left coast. No new blog entries next week while we eat too many hamburgers, see some people between here and there and I fill a few notebooks with game design notes.
Have a good weekend,
L.
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