[MM 3.1.0] Idling on rotating grids makes the beam cut off into nothingness and overload

[TheOnyxGuy]

This tape of Deflektor level 1 will show you what's wrong.

001.tape

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In summary, try to point the beam at rotating grids through fibre optics and just wait. Over time, laser will for some reason cut into some random point of empty space and will start to overload the emitter. It seems like overall changes of obstacles the beam is pointing at and is being transmitted through a teleporting device are just not liked by the game.
So, in other words, it's yet another cause of such bug but instead of being manually broken by you it's doing that glitch automatically.

[Holger]

I was able to reproduce this bug! Oh man, this very old code of the MM game engine (it is in fact incredible 35 years old now ) is stuffed with bugs.

I'll check if I can easily fix this without breaking anything else...

[Holger]

This problem should be fixed now since one of the last few versions!

[TheOnyxGuy]

Yeah, it seems to be handling beam better now, although some tiny problems are still sorta present with the beam. But man, it is better now!

The problem I mentioned here is also mostly fixed, although I still managed to make it overload couple of times somehow. The level with tape is seen below the screenshots.

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002.level

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002.tape

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But still, good job with that, seems like you're starting getting hang of that old code. Are you having any other plans on updating it? Is there a possibility to maybe even rewrite the beam logic code for cleaner and more optimized modernized engine of the game?

[Holger]

Thanks for reporting this one -- I was able to reproduce this using your level and tape, and indeed there is still something buggy going on.

I still have to debug this one... :-/

But still, good job with that, seems like you're starting getting hang of that old code. Are you having any other plans on updating it? Is there a possibility to maybe even rewrite the beam logic code for cleaner and more optimized modernized engine of the game?

This possibility exists, yes, but I would expect this to be a lot of hard work, with uncertain outcome. Especially, I do not have the illusion to produce bug free code (or at least less bugs, that is) when rewriting the MM/DF engine from scratch, so I am sure that I will still have to continue hunting bugs when "done".

One of the main problems is that the MM part and the DF part of the game engine do not really fit together, as apparently similar game elements behave in a subtile different way, and have to, to be able to solve those existing original levels for these engines.

For an insightful and entertaining read on this topic, you might want to have a look at this famous post from the good old "Joel on Software" blog:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/ ... do-part-i/

My main take-away from this article: "It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time." (Highlighting from the original blog post.)

I think he's got a point here...