Daily blog - why the dev community is awesome (and why the bugs don't care)
I don't think it'd be possible to be an Indie dev nowadays without a community of other devs offering advice and support. The complexities of the systems are beyond what any normal mortal can deal with (or maybe I'm just thick!) and some problems I couldn't solve. In this case, in creating my new lighting FX system, my ships would be drawn invisible. A guy/gal on StackOverflow put in the effort to help me, and traced the problem to a simple shader command. This organic learning process helps development keep going past uncharted waters where the devs would be otherwise lost.
Of course, the bugs defeated by this community have no soul and cannot be demoralised by such victories. They adapt and evolve, creating new problems. In this case, my aliens drawn with the same method as the spaceship decide to be drawn differently! So that's my next objective, but one I can hopefully deal with myself.
