Iron-E.jpg

EDIT: Found the culprit; a crucial script was causing the issue. The fix: put the refresh script line I initially took out back into a less troublesome position. Result: lag free game with updating events! Huzzah!

OK, OK. What's with the iron "e"? You know the story of Oedipus Rex? No?

It's a story about a king who, due to a prophecy, fears that his son, Oedipus, may kill him to get his throne. The king then has Oedipus exiled as a baby where he's found and raised by peasants. All grown up, Oedipus, sets out to find his real parents. On his way back to his home country of Thebes, he gets into an argument with another wandering man. Both men tussle for a while which ends up with Oedipus killing the man.

Oedipus reaches Thebes and quickly finds out that it's been plagued with an awful curse/monster. He slays the beast and cures the curse. The people of Thebes crown Oedipus as king and he marries the beautiful widowed queen. Even though he purged the monster, Thebes was still cursed. Oedipus asks a blind oracle for help in seeking the cause of the curse and some insight on how to lift it. Instead of receiving the knowledge he sought, he is warned that despite him ridding Thebes of evil, his newfound kingdom is even more plagued by an unseen, and unspeakable evil. The oracle tells Oedipus that he is the cause of plague saying, "You yourself are the criminal you seek." Oedipus thinks the oracle is lying to him so he tells him to piss off.

It's not until his adoptive father has died that Oedipus begins to piece together that the man on the road that he killed was not only the previous king of Thebes, but actual biological father! And the widowed queen he married is…..his mother. Ashamed and broken, Oedipus blinds himself so he may not see what he's done.

Irony.

Why did I tell you this story, you ask? I suffered from irony's cruel grasp last night. For ages, CyberDrive has, itself, been plagued with extreme lag. The lag was terrible. There could be 3 events on the map and the game would drop to 15-20 fps. I thought the lag was due to too many events on the map, weather effects, pictures, my PC, too many scripts, or a combination of all of these. Either way, it was a pain in my ass.

I knew this issue had to be fixed before any more development could take place as the lag mainly occurred during cutscenes; or more specifically, when an event had a lot of items in the list. I dedicated my whole day yesterday going through all the maps, removing scripts and running test. I finally found the root of the problem, which was a nifty script that allowed the player to run into objects and hit/bash/tackle them. It's a really cool and rare script, so you could imagine my discontent when I had to remove it.

Being the persistent person I was, I decided to fix the script rather than remove it entirely; and so I did! Yay me! It was one measly line of code causing the map to refresh every freakin' second. I nearly pissed my pants when I launched the game with over 20 events on screen and had 60 fps. GLORIOUS!!!…until I decided to playtest a scene with the stealth system. Now, a new problem arose where events on the map don't refresh!! I know what you're thinking, "Well, Roody, you did remove the line of code that stopped the map from refreshing. So it may be the script still causing an issue." I agree! So I removed said script again; this time entirely. And guess what? Didn't work. Events were still not updating. I decided to experiment a little further and reinserted the line of code. The events were updating now but the lag returned. The problem: some script that I put have in the game, maybe looooong ago, is causing the map not to refresh. :'(

TL;DR How does this tie in to irony? The script that was causing my game to lag at almost unplayable frame rates was keeping another script error in check that's affecting the stealth system. So one game-breaking bug was preventing another game-breaking bug. :/ fml

Anyways, I'm dedicating today to root out the problem. Will update this blog post once I figure out the issue. Moral of the story: good thing I playtest everything.