Okay, so I was baffled by some of the comments on 5 Colors that indicated that some of the structures in the game were partially invisible for some people (when people compared playing the game to watching the walkthrough).   I was completely unable to reproduce the bug on my system, and the really puzzling bit for me was that the background sprites used in the game are one-piece sprites.  So it seemed that random bits of otherwise visible sprites were invisible for some people.

The mystery was solved when I was finally able to reproduce the bug by playing the game on my wife’s netbook. It turns out that non-dedicated graphics cards have a hard time handling textures that are longer than around 2000 pixels on one side, which some of my background sprites were (my laptop has a low-end Geforce 8400 GS, and there’s no problem, but I’m assuming some people were playing the game on laptops with no dedicated video at all).

I chopped the larger sprites into bits (a process that is going to make any changes I want to make in the future incredibly painful), and the game now plays as it should on my wife’s netbook — and I’m assuming it will work on everyone else’s laptops as well.

So you can see that the bug was not entirely my fault, at least, not in the direct sense that my programming caused it  — though I will take responsibility for  it, since my ignorance did cause it .

Thank you very much to everyone who has commented on the game so far: I wouldn’t have found this bug without your help! I would be incredibly grateful if some of you who were experiencing this problem could try the game again, and let me know in the comments if the it is now working for you properly. Incredibly grateful.

You can download the fixed build here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 9:56 pm and is filed under LD #16 - Exploration - 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.