Week 43/2012: Turbulence
Last week we merged our work branches to the master and ran into a number of issues in the 1.9.10 unstable builds. Some of these we managed to fix in time for today's build, but a few oddities remain.
It is never a pleasant situation when code that works perfectly in the development environment fails completely in the final deployed configuration. Unfortunately that is what we experienced last week. At the root of many of the problems were my changes to the plugin naming, their deployment location and loading mechanism. On Windows, I had overlooked updating the crucial installation script that tells Inno Setup which files to copy and where to put them. Also on Windows, the engine failed to start because it could not find a directory that was expected to exist. On OS X, the launcher's virtual directory mappings were not up to date for the new plugin names, causing the engine not to find the resources for the chosen game plugin. In the OS X 10.6 build we are still seeing odd behavior when it comes to the plugins (it is likely to crash on you), however the 10.4 build seems to work OK.
This kind of turbulence is not unexpected when merging in larger changes. Doomsday is a complex system and when you are juggling three operating systems, a slip-up is likely to occur every now and then. Expect to see daily new unstable builds until the issues have been resolved.
My plan for this week is to restore the master back to a fully operational state on all platforms.
It is never a pleasant situation when code that works perfectly in the development environment fails completely in the final deployed configuration. Unfortunately that is what we experienced last week. At the root of many of the problems were my changes to the plugin naming, their deployment location and loading mechanism. On Windows, I had overlooked updating the crucial installation script that tells Inno Setup which files to copy and where to put them. Also on Windows, the engine failed to start because it could not find a directory that was expected to exist. On OS X, the launcher's virtual directory mappings were not up to date for the new plugin names, causing the engine not to find the resources for the chosen game plugin. In the OS X 10.6 build we are still seeing odd behavior when it comes to the plugins (it is likely to crash on you), however the 10.4 build seems to work OK.
This kind of turbulence is not unexpected when merging in larger changes. Doomsday is a complex system and when you are juggling three operating systems, a slip-up is likely to occur every now and then. Expect to see daily new unstable builds until the issues have been resolved.
My plan for this week is to restore the master back to a fully operational state on all platforms.