Sunday, February 17, 2008

Crash Fixes

Ever since Rise of Kunark released I've been victim to frequent crashes. It was pretty frustrating for me, because as you all know I enjoy playing EverQuest 2 as much as the rest of you, and I was unable to keep up with everyone as they paved their way to level 80.

I had spoken to our programming staff about the crashes a few times, and they had made adjustments to the game, but it just never seemed to work for me, so slowly but surely I got out of the groove of playing, the holidays crept up and I fell way behind on my character who is only l evel 72 to this day.

Some time last month I started getting restless, mostly because I saw the epics looming and I wanted to be in on the fun. So I started rattling the cages again, and the next thing you know we are bringing in my personal machine from home to help debug the problem. I had narrowed down exactly how to get a crash within about a minute, so it wasn't a problem for me to demonstrate the problem over and over, and it didn't take very long to figure out what the issue is.

Once we tracked it down, I was pleased to see that we had a new experimental executable ready, which I tested from home for a few days. It ended up working out after a few tweaks, so I'm pleased to say that I can finally get cracking on my way to level 80 again!

I managed to play several hours uninterupted the other day which was refreshing. What is really amazing for me is how the game all comes together in areas that I just had nothing to do with, but can be equally proud of. When you work on zones, they don't have music or sound effects yet. That stuff comes later down the line and just magically appears as Cat makes her rounds adding all of it in. Well, it's magical to me at least, it's probably a long arduous process for her. Anyways, when I was running around Teren's Grasp in the Kylong Plains I couldn't help but be impressed with how epic the music sounded. Nice job!

I have lots of gaming stuff to write about, I've just been really lazy about my blog which I really should take more seriously. Suggestions on topics of discussion are welcome.

3 comments:

Nick McLaren said...

NICE! Well done man! Guaranteed you weren't the only player to have that trouble so getting it out of the way is a beautiful thing. =)

..and you ALL did a FANTABULOUS job on RoK! It's absolutely something to be proud of =)

Cheers,

Nick

Anonymous said...

I'm glad to see they've gotten you going. I've never had problems with Vista, so I must have that elusive executable somehow...

Steve Kramer (a.k.a. Saavedra) said...

You are a lucky one there Morgan.