5 . 3. Section Roundup

1. 5.3.Section Roundup Exploration of project hand-in and section roundup

2. Question Clinic: FAQ In lecture exploration of answers to frequently asked student questions

3. Exploratory Milestone Exploration of the Week 6 Exploratory Milestone

4. To do: Complete questions Week 6 Exploratory Milestone (Question 1) Remember this is not a binding contract – it is intended to help you plan and manage your development.

5. Week 6 Exploratory Milestone (Question 2) Initial time estimates tend to be optimistic and rarely realised. Experience (sometimes bitter) enables better estimates!

6. Week 6 Exploratory Milestone (Question 3) Please do identify any specific areas of concern or uncertainty on which you would like to receive feedback.

7. CSC2007 Oscars Mid-way awards

8. CSC2007 Oscars The first lecture on Week 7 will be an awards ceremony (a bit of fun) based on the Week 6 Exploratory Milestone submission. A number of different prize categories can/may be recognised and rewarded, as follows:

9. CSC2007 Oscars Most authentic rendition of a classic computer game Most original/fun game design or game play idea Game I least want to present at the Board of Examiners

10. CSC2007 Oscars Most comprehensive game design including development plan and contingency planning. Game with the best title Game with the most inappropriate title

11. CSC2007 Oscars Submission with the most impressive exploratory code Aside: There actually will be prizes!

12. Debugging Advice Overview of debugging advice

13. Debugging in games Debugging in games is often hard: Update/draw process happens very frequently and quickly (~60 times second, 17ms per tick). It can be hard to reason about what is happening. A lot of the available debugging tools cannot be easily applied to games (including GPU interaction)

14. Debugging (The Commandments) Thou shalt have a clear understanding of what should happen This may be obvious, but sometimes people start debugging without a clear understanding of what should happen. Thou shalt reproduce the problem consistently It is much easier to debug and test a problem that can be consistently reproduced, although sometimes this is not realistically achieveable. Thou shalt test your assumptions Debugging is a process of identifying your assumptions (this can be hard) and then testing to see if they hold.

15. Debugging (The Commandments) Thou shalt divide and conquer In order to manage game complexity, ‘high-level’ assumptions should be firstly checked to enable the search to be constrained. Thou shalt think and look Debugging is a process of identifying an assumption and then checking the code (log file, debugger, print statements) to test that assumption. Thou shalt change on thing at a time When testing changes to a program, only one factor should be changed at a time to limit interdependency.

16. Debugging (The Commandments) Thou shalt keep an audit trail Either using code versioning (or pen & paper and simple backups) , keep a record of changes made to the program Thou shalt thoroughly test the correction The correction should be tested to ensure the original problem has been fixed with no impact on existing working components. Thou shalt not let the problem unfixed Ignoring a problem only increases the new bug complexity and can introduce later problems or introduce dependency upon the buggy code.

17. Summary Today we explored: • Information to be submitted for the Week 6 Handin • Useful approach towards game debugging To do: • Bring together explored material to progress design and develop code • Develop work plan for next week • Work towards completing hand-in