Here Be Dragons

Yes, I know I'm not the first person to apply that phrase to my code, but I promise I came up with the idea before I found out about the others. In any case, that admonition appears at the top of my collision detection code AKA "where edge cases are literally edge cases". Note that this is actually a proper use of "literally" as opposed to most of the places you'll see it.:-)

Not surprisingly then, I've been spending pretty much all of my development time on Coldest working out kinks and full-blown bugs in the collision detection code. It's still not perfect, but I <i>think</i> it's good enough to not completely break the game anymore. It was a pretty serious problem when players could fall through the world and shoot from underground with impunity. Fortunately that doesn't seem to be possible anymore (15 bots randomly walking into things for 8+ hours never found a way to get through so it's unlikely anyone else will either).

So that's what I've been doing for the past (almost) two months in which I may have seemed to have disappeared. On a more administrative note, because testing has started, and with the fixing of the collision detection bugs I think more exhaustive testing is in order, I've opened a Sourceforge project for Coldest so that I have a place to track bugs and put random development information that could potentially be useful to somebody somewhere. Links can be found in the navigation menu to the left.

In any case, bear with me as I fight my way through the "last 10% that takes 90% of the effort". I know it's been slow going lately, but I think I've taken care of at least 80% of that effort. Famous last words, I know.:-)