Horses, not zebras

My odd random crash ended up being memory trampling that I had introduced when I decided I may need the full 256 characters in the standard Latin font instead of just the first 127. I changed all of the code apart from the array that actually holds the character descriptors. You can imagine what fun this caused. Because I'm new to iPhone I've gotten in the habit of looking up things on Google and the iPhone forums before I start debugging. This lead me to an article on almost the exact same crash caused by threading. If I'd have been on any other system I would of course seen a random system crash out of nowhere as memory corruption. It's the most common cause. It only goes to prove, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras!


So, I've got the font system working and the scoring in. I used a standard windows font to generate a bitmap font via a little piece of shareware I found on the net. One little problem though. I looked up the copyright on the font and it's not licensed for use in software or for redistribution or modification. No problem I thought, I'll go hunting for a free font. Although there are loads of free fonts on the internet all the ones I found were released under one of the open licences. Unfortunately although these licenses allows free use for almost all uses they have a clause about redistribution and modification which technically I am doing both. I'm modifying the font by converting it to bitmap and I'm redistributing it in the game. I'm sure there are truly free fonts out there but I can't seem to find any!!!!! I'll worry about that later I think.


I'm being visited by a good friend tomorrow who has offered to help out on the project in order for me to get it done by my self imposed deadline. Hopefully he'll be able to do some of the donkey work for me such as menu's and title screens. This'll take some boring but necessary work away from me and let me get on with the actual game bits. I've got the source control database set up and have used it remotely so there shouldn't be any problems. Assuming that is he doesn't object to my shoddy code!


I got JTB's laptop back today with a lovely new screen which means I can code away from home. I may accidentally keep it a bit longer. Thanks John!