PocketMatrix

hopefully you will like it & maybe think it's done PF some justice. My biggest problem is lack of time so in a few years I plan to re-arrange things so I get more time for games writing once I don;t need so much money.

Hi Frank, You are correct about some work to do but today's been a good day. I have not been able to run a release version on PPC for ages & now I have a version which runs & only crashes inb the same place one in five so I'm now looking at initialisation I think. I found a whopping memory leak earlier using the Entrek toolbox demo. It's hard to use the demo as it only lets you see the first 50 operations in detail. After that it's guess work but will a bit of effort you can figure where it's at in the app. On the down side it seems to think that everything's a memory leak until it's free'd or deleted so I'm not sure what's going on.

Yep, Entrek is an invaluable tool. Parasoft C++ Test is another one that helped me a great deal in working on K&G Arcade. BoundsChecker is the other must-have tool.

thanks Frank, can either of these be used with eVC++? I had a look at Boundcheker quickly & did not see CE? I do have a VC6++ build so can use.

Have you purchased any of these 3 tools?
Which would you say helped the most?

To the best of my knowledge, Entrek is the only CE-specific tool. The others I think are VC++ only.

I didn't purchase them because we had copies at work, so I was able to test my code after hours. Fortunate, because they are rather expensive! Well worth it I'd say however.

As to which was most useful, I frankly don't remember, except that I can say they were all very useful. They all cought things that either I wouldn't have on my own until problems came up, or would have with a lot of time spent.

I should also point out that they all tend to give some level of "false-positives", so you do have to be a little careful with the results. I don't remembe specific errors, but I remember there were some things they flagged as problems that were really just choices in the way things were coded. Better they get reported than not of course, so it's not a problem I think, just something to be aware of.

After lots of debugging this week I'm sitting here with a release version on PPC which is not crashing !!!. I'm not going to release a beta until I have checked several more times & made the installer but I'm starting to think the game is almost stable.

Whoooo! Congrats Conan.