power-button bug

On the game design axis, I am quite satisfied with the final level of school Rush and how it integrates with the earlier levels. It took A. (from the S-Team) Some 30 attempts to beat it, but she hasn't turned mad or bored, and even enjoyed being wrapped to level 1 afterwards.

On the technical side, my latest personal tests hit me with a bug I thought I fixed long time ago: getting stuck in a ceiling, There are few places where this can happen in the game, but if it happens, you will remain stuck, possibly forever unless you use the power button to trash all your progress and reboot. Would a player feel like starting the game again in such conditions? I don't think so.
 
The thing is, the basis pretty hard to track, a bit tedious to reproduce and all my attempts to fix it have failed ... so far.

What I truly need is a tool that will allow me to identify the sequence of state transitions that led to the offending state when I finally manage to reproduce it. Another debugging tool that would complement Inspector widget for cases that cannot be solved by single-stepping on setting breakpoints.

edit: let's stop rambling, let's start cracking ...

Bug is tedious to reproduce

Then let's make it easier to reproduce. Let's have e.g. a build of the game with much more lives, more hitpoints if needed, that drop you in a place where it is easy to try reproducing the bug. Let's go to that level with the DS, too, and try to get into the wall in as many ways as possible (runMe is neat for that because it let me launch any level), to get a better understanding of the conditions that make it happen.

Moreover, we're running on an emulator, here. And emulator typically have a free save-state mechanism. I'm unsure whether it works flawlessly with desmume, but it's worth giving it a try.


Bug is hard to track

Then let's make our best to get as much information as we can from a succesful run.

Granted, the ideal would be to have a curve plotted, annotated with state changes, in readable colors and where I could get any set of gob variable at any time by just pointing at a spot on the curve. But we don't have that. Granted, last time I had to use both ddd breakpoints and Inspector widget, but that doesn't mean I cannot do better this time.

So the ideal would be a time machine that let me replay things if I ever manage to produce the bug, and view what happened in slow motion, eh ? Wait ... that tool exists already. That tool is ... recording game + Inspector widget as an animation and replaying it!

Bug couldn't be fixed so far.

I thought I knew what happened by looking at the code that makes Verso bounce, because I know I had to fix the problem for Verso (the bouncing eraser). And the solution was to detect the impact's vertical speed to tell ceilings apart from floors, and prevent the 'fail [assuming on the ground]' from happening when what really happened was 'fail [on the ceiling]'.

So after I located something similar with the "HIT" state of Bilou, I thought I got rid of the problem. But since I don't have well-isolated test cases for the state machine (yet), seeing the bug again doesn't mean that the fix wasn't effective: simply that it might not be an isolated case.

To be continued ...