Fun With Excel

(Actually its the Open Office Excel clone, but I can't even remember it's name...)

Saturday night I got my development environment under Windows XP in workable shape (I won't say it is totally working, because there still seem to be some oddities).

I then started to look into the regression.

I am trying to run the regression like a real game, which means all the micro-management entailed in a new game (part of the reason for NewStars was the hope of eventually automating the micro-management).

I have a spreadsheet (the famous STARS!.xls), which allows for colony planning.

The spreadsheet is incredible, and is invaluable for checking the server code.

I found a bug regarding partial completion. Imagine a factory built 1 resource at a time, over 10 turns. The factory costs 4 germ. How do you subtract the 4 G, and not 0 or 10. Our code was subtracting 0...

After I fixed that, I found a (what I think is) a bug in the spreadsheet!

So, I spent all day looking at spreadsheets, and ending up starting a new spreadsheet.

Fun! Fun!

New Stars Status

Wow! A long time with no updates!

Real life has interfered with development, hampered by some irritating 64 bit problems. Apparently, the C runtime in Windows Vista accepts %ll for printf. The same cannot be said for Windows XP.

I had been doing most of my development on a Windows Vista machine, but lately have had to fall back to Windows XP. That's when I noticed the regression doesn't pass.

I tried to track down the printf's and replace them with ostringstreams (finally a case where C++ is better than C!), but there are just too many of them. I ended up doing:
vi `grep -l '%ll' *.cpp`
And
%s/%ll/%I64

Ahh, saved by vi.

The regression is now somewhat passing, but there are some oddities... need to check against Vista...