Adrian v1.0 RELEASED!

At last I ironed out the bugs in the 1.0 branch and was able to release Adrian both for Windows and Linux. You can download the Linux version or the Pre-Compiled Windows Version.

Hope you guys enjoy the game. Do report any bugs you find here.

Source code is licensed under GPLv3 and the SVN repository is located here.

Here are some screenshots from the game (scaling them reduced the quality here)







Same post is copied at adriangame.blogspot.com

Interesting Bug in C++ code

I was trying hard to release a 1.0 version of Adrian game, but we had to face a showstopper bug which was crashing the Windows Release version, on start of the game itself. After hunting for it for a long time, I was able to figure out the bug, which turned out to be a very interesting issue.

Basically we have a structure which has an embedded vector STL class in it. What the code was doing was to create the structure, and before assigning contents to it, was simply memsetting the entire structure to 0. While this is normal operation in any C code, in C++ this can cause very weird bugs.

When the vector is embedded in the structure as a C++ class (Composition), it's constructor gets calls when the structure is created. This constructor actually setting some fields (pointers namely) to some initial values. However, when we memset the structure, the vector fields are again initialized to zero (and the pointer to NULL). So whenever I try to access the vector it causes a panic.

The fix was to simply remove the memset code, and then write a new constructor for the structure, which will initialize the other variables to zero, leaving the vectors alone. What a bug! it took a lot of hunting to get to this one :)

Now, We would be able to release Adrian 1.0 version soon.

Resurrecting Adrian

Adrian was the name of the game which me and my friends swamy and vamsi, have written in 2003. We were studying 3rd year in IIIT-Hyd, and there was a game design contest announced. We immediately jumped on board and wrote this game - Adrian - in flat 7 days (actually more nights :P). It was awesome for a week's effort, and we won the first prize for it.

We had to borrow my friend's CPU for a week, since the graphics card on which we could actually program was very expensive and beyond our means. Unfortunately, after the contest, the development stalled as we cannot afford the graphics cards. Later I was able to afford one, but then, I was working full-time, so that left little time for game development.

A week ago, I got a mail from a guy who played the game and liked it. That prodded me into going back and look through the code and realized I was as excited about it, as I was when we first got the idea. So I decided to resurrect the game, and immediately moved the code to Google code for version control, and started working on it. The latest code and developments can be seen here.

I am also working on giving this game a newer home somewhere on the net. This might take a while as I plan to first improve the game etc. The old website of the game can be found here.