Short update on the beta crunch. I think I have the video loading system down. It needs to be quite robust if you consider that the game has 80MB of videos. At this point it’s loading videos just fine. It even has it’s own progress bar in case a cut-scene can’t be delivered in time.
I spend a long time today dealing with a particularly annoying bug. Again, this is because of the unnecessarily complex video system in Flash. You see, the video contains mostly the actual video data but also at some point during the load, it also loads so-called meta-data. That contains useful information such as the length or the size of the video. The weird thing is that especially in videos, which are already in cache or loaded directly from the drive, the meta-data seems to arrive AFTER the actual video. This is something I have discovered just today and I had to rewrite some of the code to take this into account.
This was already weird. But then some videos would trigger a bizarre effect where the meta-data would be delivered over and over again. It would cause all sorts of troubles, eventually even slowing down the game. Again, this is yet again some really silly bug caused by the complexity of the API and I’m quite upset that I lost so much time because of it.
But on the bright side, I got it under control and I’m moving on to the last part of this loading system now – the images. I would say that the hardest part is over but I had way too many setbacks now to say something silly like that. Wish me luck.
