It’s been a while

Sheesh it’s been too long since I was here writing. I missed it honestly. So where have I been? Well, there’s two main things that took me away from this. The first is that my computer nearly died.

A Close Call

You can skip this section if you’re not interested in computer problems, and it’s also a bit of a ramble haha.

TLDR; Computer started frequently crashing, initially thought it was a game’s anti-cheat system program. It wasn’t. After extensive troubleshooting, I thought I pinned down the issue as some Intel-related drivers. Attempts to reinstall Windows failed, so I switched to Linux, but the crashes continued. Ultimately, I discovered that disabling CPU cores in Linux resolved the issue, and plan to build a new computer soon.

At the time of writing the past articles, occasionally my computer crashed. Which isn’t good of course, but it wasn’t all that frequent, only common enough for me to know it happened. Also it usually happened when I opened up a game - Dead by Daylight & so I thought it was the invasive anti-cheat as that opens first, and online I saw people also crashing due to the anti-cheat. And of course, I was wrong.

Almost out of nowhere my computer started crashing more, seemingly at random. Not just when opening Dead by Daylight. Then after work every day I just spent my time trying to troubleshoot. I must’ve spent like >40 hours trying to figure it out, to no avail. I fell down multiple rabbit holes, and tried loads of things. All the while my computer crashed more and more often. It got to the point where it was unusable since it could crash at almost any moment.

After much troubleshooting I found the problem to be related to intel drivers. At that moment my mind went back to when I had previously used some driver management software to update drivers. To this day I’m not sure if that was the root cause, but yeah that’s the best option. I couldn’t seem to fix it, repairing drivers seemed not doable, tried uninstalling many, using some other software, and more. Didn’t work. Then I tried a CPU diagnostic tool from intel. This was it. Whenever I ran the test my computer would crash pretty much without fail. So I thought it was for sure the drivers. high cpu = crash so borked un-fixable driver issue.

Time to reinstall windows. Or so I thought. Windows refused to uninstall itself. Couldn’t repair installation, couldn’t fresh install from a USB, I couldn’t even get it to full wipe. It would just stop at some point (not crash) and then the login screen would still have my account.

I tried installing windows in all the ways I could over like 3 days. Now keep in mind I use my computer for work, so this was all quite stressful, and frustrating to be honest. Then an idea hit me, linux! If windows refused to install, maybe linux would just not care & wipe windows. Did a quick bit of research, small bit of tinkering, and boom, linux mint running. Now my drivers should be fixed and the computer chilling right?

Nope. Even on linux mint, I still crashed. This pissed me off, my reliable computer that I’d used for everything for a bit over 3 years all of a sudden completely failing with no discernable cause.

Then one day while I was out, it hit me. My CPU has 16 cores. The crashes when I have high CPU usage seem random, but I thought about more. When my CPU usage is high, I bet more cores are being used. What if one of the cores, somehow, in some way has some fault, and when that CPU core is used too much it gives some sort of unexpected erroneous result that caused the crash? Ok so to test that, I would need to disable my cores, I’d do 8 at first since if that crashed I can try the other 8, and if it didn’t crash it would narrow down which half has the bad core yada yada binary search. But I didn’t even know if you could disable cores, and if you could, how? I’d try when I got home.

A quick bit of googling later and wow, it’s actually incredibly easy. At least on linux, didn’t check how I can do that for windows. But apparently on linux, each core is represented by a folder or something, and to disable usage of said core, you write a 0 to it for false. That’s it. Here’s the script I use to disable cores:

for x in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-6]*/online; do
  echo 0 > "$x"
done

And… It works! My computer actually doesn’t crash. Now I know I could probably play with this methodology, and maybe figure out which single core is the issue, but I’m honestly just happy I can use my computer. I’m saving to build a new computer now though and once I’ve got that, I’ll probably mess with this more and see what’s up. For now though I’m just leaving things as-is so I’ve got a machine I can use.

But yeah that whole saga was about a week and a half. During that time I was definitely not in the mind to write more about ChompChomp, I didn’t even have time to work on it really. And yeah I’ve got all my files still, everything is backed up so I’m good there.

So far linux is pretty cool. For the most part stuff works, there’s some things I definitely miss, but given that my machine is not running at full power I think I’ll chill on linux until I can build my next computer since it’s a much more lightweight OS than windows and I’m not running at full power.

Busy

I moved all my work related things to my laptop in light of my computer issues, and that’s taken a bit of adjusting to. So that combined with the computer issue & some work projects, meant I’ve just been really busy.

I also randomly spent a week or so working on a discord bot for polls which has been fun, but then I realized since I’m saving for a computer I can’t get a server and launch it just yet

It turned out pretty well though! It has a popup that asks for some basic info, then spits out a poll with buttons that let you choose a response, and shows a nice little graph of the results.

Then literally a day later I saw this:

Yep, discord is working on native polls. Pain. Or so I thought, then I realized I could probably handle them with my bot, so I think I’ll keep working on it. Also I realized my bot’s polls will probably have more features.

• Up to 25 answer choices
• Custom duration for polls
• Behavior customization (allow multiple answers, allow changing answers, etc)
• Image results
• A web-based dashboard with past poll results, and the ability to create polls from there
• Scheduled polls
• Choose what channel the poll is sent in

Etc… And if the bot is able to interact with built-in polls then I can have it do all that with the nicer looking native polls so it’d be a win-win. Anyways let’s get back to ChompChomp shall we!?

ChompChomp plans

Alright, I know it’s kind of ironic that the last article was plans for a huge hand-craft map with 3 tilesets and whatnot, but I’m gonna have to go back on what I said. Why? Welp, since before ChompChomp there was another game I wanted to make, and that has to come after. During these past few weeks, I’ve wanted to work on ChompChomp, but even more so the game I originally wanted to make.

Maybe you’re thinking something like: “Why didn’t you just start there?” which is good question. The reason is mainly that game is far more complex than ChompChomp in pretty much every way. I didn’t even know the controls for the editor so I felt diving into such a complicated game would be a bad idea. Now though, I’m far more familiar with the editor, of course not all aspects but enough to get around for the most part. The big thing though is just that game is way more exciting to me, and I think it’ll be more interesting to anyone reading. In addition if it does go well I think that game would be far more potentially successful than ChompChomp could be.

This isn’t to say that I’m abandoning ChompChomp here and now, definitely not - but rather, I’ll be vastly scaling down the goals for now to get something basic working. The big plans will be shelved, and I’m sure if I come back to those plans I’ll be able to do em easily. More to come on the unnamed game…

ChompChomp going bite sized

Alright so we’re turning down the scale dial on goals big time. I think to wrap things up with ChompChomp I’ll get just the core gameplay working.

• Basic map
  • parallax background
  • basic tileset
• Bruce
  • Bite
    • Eat to grow
  • Dash attack
• Some basic NPCs
  • passive
    • will run away from Bruce
    • can’t attack
    • school of small fish
  • neutral
    • might move away from Bruce, or might stay
    • won’t attack unless provoked
  • aggressive
    • will attack Bruce
    • will run away if Bruce is too big (some)
• Leaderboard
  • score attack mode!

Which might seem like still quite a bit, and it is but I’ve just decided on not doing some of the much bigger aspects, namely: multiplayer pvp, 3 different playable sharks with their own abilities, enormous hand-crafted map, and skins. Might throw in a couple skins for fun, but we’ll see.

I think this is still a pretty fair bit to do, and I have one thing that I might throw in but we’ll see. I’m really excited to get to the next game though so we’ll see how hammering this out goes!

Goals

Time for the usual, goals! Next up will still be the map, and background. That’s probably the biggest single task, so I think we’ll stick with just this for now. Anyways, if you made it this far, or if you didn’t thanks for reading and see ya next time

• Map
  • Parallax background
  • Basic tileset