Programming with defines and Toast

Everyone should program and use defines. I know i don't usually make statements that are so cut and dried. However in the case of using defines over actual values in the game i am very Very set. I am actually writing this because of what happened recently to one of my projects. We have a set of values (game ids) and for some reason the values were never setup as defines. Though in lua defines are not pre-processor efficient, which is a real pity. However we still strive to use them because of readability and consistency.

So there we have people typing in the game id all over the place. I just never really noticed it and so never addressed it.I would have either fixed all the files up myself or got one of the other programmers to fix up all the games. I love consistency and this kind of thing can only lead to no good. Usually noone notices this kind of thing too often, it never quite tends to bite ya in the butt, in my case and long history of coding and doing games though i have seen this kind of thing turn bad several times.

This one caught us out in The Midway, and has cost us some money, we believe that it has cost us possibly thousands of dollars. We cannot of course estimate how much, but we know it wouldn't be a small number. It took me a few hours to trace the issue and eventually the bug we had was simply an inconsistant game id typed in. I suspect that this particular game id was changed at some point from 5 to 7, but then the code was broken. However if a define had been used a complete reorganization of the game ids cold happen and there wold be no side effect, although they can still be misused and break code (by using greater or less then compares etc). I have of course fixed this bug by simply using the correct value of 7. It did get me to call a programmer meeting to discuss this issue and remind all of us programmers of the importance of defines. It was a good meeting, even if it is one that i wished i had not had to call.

Toast is great, one of those foods that is just great... Burn some bread to a certain amount and for some reason it takes on some different qualities than just bread. For the last few days i have had some for breakfast with butter and jam on it. Yum yum it is tastey. I do not know why though, but the toast just seems to taste better in Britain than it does in California. I do not understand this, but would love to, so i can fix me Californian toast.

It is now raining and so i am going to walk to the shops and enjoy getting wet along the way. Then it is off to visit more family. YAY!

Have a great day everyone
laters

I suck at The Midway Comps

So far i have run 2 competitions for Codes for The Midway. Both have managed to suck in some way or other. Let me tell you about them.

1. My first try was to do a ReTweet competition. I see these all the time and i think they are fast, dynamic and easy. Well i thought they seemed easy till i actually did one. First off ya gotta have enough followers that are interested in what you are giving away. Most of my followers are industry peeps and mostly on the Xbox. This seems like the wrong demographic to be giving out codes to. You are correct of course it was. Though that was not my real issue.
I started off by saying the comp would end at midnight and someone would be chosen that was following me and retweeted #themidway tag. Seemed simple enough and i was just following on from what i have seen others do. However i ran into an issue right away.
Which midnight? Yep, thats right i needed to clarify that i mean't Pacific standard time, as i am a west coaster. DOH! time for some retweets of my midified 140 chars.
At 10 minutes to midnight i decided to start looking at who might be eligible for winning. I was really interested in how many people were in the running. As it turns out a quick search showed me 3. I had hoped for 6 at least, ahh well. Then i went thru my emails telling me that people had started following me. Lo and behold there was a person in there that had started following me and had also retweeted my message, BUT was not appearing the search list. How, How can that be? I still do not have the answer, but i added him to the list and at 12 midnight i got a random number and it hit one on the list. I DM'd him the code and that was that.
2. My second competition was simple as well. This time i put in a barkey code into a post i have on this blog. I then colored it black to match the background. To see it you just have to select the page and Whammo, there it is. I only tweeted about the fact that it existed and before long someone had found it. But it did not work for him. I was sorely disappointed, but at the time had no idea why it did not work.
It has to do with zones. I did not know that my codes were only for the American servers. So the people that kept finding the code in my Blog post were from Europe, bah! This disappoints me greatly.
In the end someone tried the code from America on my blog only to discover it has already gone. Though i do not know who has claimed it, as they have not told me. But i am glad someone is using the barkey now 8D

Next competition will be another twitter one, but i am running out of time before i travel to England tomorrow. so maybe i will get one more in tonight, and then i will do more of them when i get back from Blighty. Also i will ask for some european codes as well. I hate to miss people out, isn't that some sort of prejudice ? haha

Laters