Sometimes Your Own Dog Food Tastes Bad
Writing my own Quake editor (ToeTag) has been a great experience in many ways. One of the good ways, obviously, is that it allows me to work on Quake levels on my Mac! One of the bad things, however, is that when something goes bad or breaks or crashes - it’s my fault. And I have to fix it. Blargh.
Something I’m discovering with my latest level is that ToeTag was a little bit of a memory hog. It was allocating over 1GB of RAM to get that level into memory. I figured out what was wrong this morning and now it fits into about 100MB but those are the kinds of things that you don’t discover until you’re pushing the edges a little bit. Small maps didn’t show this issue. This large map does.
Sadly, it still doesn’t fix the weird WAD related loading crash that I get in release mode. It doesn’t do it in debug at all which makes it super awesome to try and fix. Stupid dog food.
September 9th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
You’re a programmer who actually uses his own editor! For real production work! And this makes the editor as good as it (probably) is. Same was true for UnrealEd. Too bad I don’t have a Mac…
September 10th, 2008 at 4:02 am
Yeah, I’m not really complaining - it just gets frustrating at times. Like, you sit down and are all fired up to get some level work done but you run into a bug that requires you to work on the code for a few hours first. Kind of takes the fire out of the process sometimes.
On the whole though, it’s a nice situation to be able to do that.