Warscale - A series of infortunate events

Hi everybody!

This has been another disastrous week for me... if there is a saint, god, patron or any higher being who cares for the independent game developers (does anybody cares for us at all?) then he/she/it must be really pissed of with me... or maybe its just Murphy and one of his laws making fun of me.

And it affected Warscale directly. Warscale master and shard servers were implemented using TGEA 1.0 which will only run in a PC with a shader capable video card. This was temporary of course except that on Monday, while seeing an episode of Dr House, some deadly disease jumped from one of the patients to the chips of the video card of my faithful HP dv9330 and destroyed it... that... or it was one of those accursed chips which nVidia has accepted as defectuous. And, as usual in this cases, it had to happen one month after the warranty expired.

As in this laptop model the video card, and nVidia Geforce Go 7600, is integrated in the mainboard, it cripples all the laptop. I know its the HW because I tried to restart the PC using a linux instalation... the video card showed the same problem. Fortunately I managed to disable the nVidia drivers and nuke them off the system by manually deleting them. After restarting and allowing the default vga drivers take control of the video card (any attempt to install the nVidia drivers brought the Blue Screen of Death) and after some time of navigation in glorious 800x600, I found a forum with all the guys with the same or similar HP laptops with exactly the same problems. One of them recommended to install one specific type of video drivers and disabling Aero. I managed to solve the problem and get the default 1440x900 again but I just cannot run any 3D game or even play a DVD or the BSOD appears... at least it allows my wife to work fine and the camera works. I really need to contact the HP service...I dont know what happens... I never had any problems with any HP product. In fact I was in love with this laptop... no more nVidia chips for me... its ATI from now on... may have slower cards (except the latest one which is hitting nVidia where it hurts) but I have never had any problem with them.

...and... in restrospective... this was one of the minor things that happened this week... go figure.

So, I was forced to change the servers to my secondary laptop, a Dell Latitude 530 with an Intel integrated card. Of course TGEA 1.0 laughed, spit me at my face and refused to run. I tried to recopile using TGEA 1.7 but the codebase is different so it didnt want to compile... looks like 1.7 doesnt like to mix with its older siblings... looks like this engine has as many personalities as versions. So, I decided to use TGE instead of TGEA which was planned as a task for a later moment. I setup a new environment with mySQL and the DB API I use (SQLApi.com). Fixed some problems with the SQL version, changed connection ports and after a couple of days I got it all online again. The nice thing about this is that the server is now really lightweight and I can run it in Linux or Windows. Not bad at all...

At this time I noticed I had abandoned the client-server arhitecture for too long. The programming style is different. I guess this 6 months of working with Torque really have improved my Torque-scripting skills. So I'm now reworking the code. Not everything of course but I'm lifting and updating the code and controls in many different places. A nip here... a tuck here... not an extreme makeover but in the way...

Ok, I hope I can make a lot of progress this week... no shot this week unless you want to see me crying along my lappy...

Luck (lets clarify it as good luck... just in case) to all you in your projects!

Guimo

P.D. Or maybe its just the perfect excuse to convince my wife to get a new laptop... may not be so bad luck after all... any suggestions?