Evil Weevils

Yesterday I got my game running and the install built. FTP shenanigans prevented upload and that kind of sucks, but it's mo better now and I'll finally have something for The Tester to do again. Turns out, if you change your FTP access password and forget all about it the site won't let you access all your sweet, delicious, cancer causing data. Sometimes I hate internet.
For shits and the occasional giggle I went ahead and ran the game to play the 3rd level in its entirety. I discovered some bugs. Crappy bugs. Bugs that I had thought I had fixed. Like, my leak is back for some reason. I think. The new laptop gets hot and the game slows down. I don't know if one thing is causing the other or what. I have no idea if it's a hardware issue or a software one, and the Vista OS (BS?) doesn't exactly make things easy.
Second, my collision engine does some odd nonsense and I don't know why. I can dash into walls sometimes and that does incredibly odd things that it shouldn't be fuggin doing. I have zero idea why though since I haven't bloody touched the collision engine since I built it. Ah, wait. I did. I put the floor collision before the wall collision in an attempt to fix a different bug (which still doesn't work by the way). I'll put it back.
Ah, right, and sometimes if you dash into a ledge, there will be a quick frame of being inside the ledge before it corrects itself.
The problem that gives me the urge to kill is a different collision bit that I thought was fixed. It has to do with stairs. Basically, The Thief has 4 collision boxes around him. One on his feet, one on his head and one on either side of him. When these boxes touch collision rectangles, they modify the position of the character. So the bottom one will make him stand on top of a rectangle if the bottom collision rectangle is touching it.
The trick is that the side rectangles do not go all the way to the floor. There is a gap of about 15 pixels or so. Hence, if a platform is only 10 pixels high, the side rectangles never touch it and never modify the character's position. When you walk over them, the bottom rectangle then triggers and you step up instead. If you make a series of these, you can build steps. That works great.
The problem comes when you jump on the stairs. If you hit the corner just right the floor eats you. Something odd is going on and then you disappear from the room like Andy Dufresne. My hypothesis is that is has to do with rectangle ordering. Basically, the engine runs through every single rectangle in a list, from top to bottom. This gives a certain priority to the earlier rectangles. If a side rectangle triggers before the floor, you'll never touch said floor. That would also cause it to work correctly in most situations, but not when jumping or when higher, logarithmic speeds are involved. So, possibly it's not a bug I can correct for. I instead have to build stairs from the bottom up and not the other way around. I'll give it a shot and see what I can come up with.

- In not game stuff, I'm still waiting around like an idiot for Cal State to let me know what the hells is going on. So, like a proactive little would-be student I called. The conversation went thus:
"Hi, my name's Eric and my student number is number number digit number number number digit. I can't sign up for orientation. What gives?"
"Ah, well you're not currently accepted."
"Okay, when will I know. Like today? Tomorrow?"
"Sometime before the first day of class."
"But are fees due the day you register? Else you are dropped, correct?"
"Yes."
"So how do I get loans and stuff all on the same day? That doesn't seem like that would give me a lot of time, now does it?"
*silence*
"Hello?"
"Just keep checking the site. We'll also send you an email to let you know."
"Maybe, possibly, conceviably, eventually."
What really gets me is that I'm a bloody Senior already. I've got a trully staggering amount of credits. If all credits were the same I'd have 4 degrees already. Provided I were accepted (again) then I wouldn't even be there that long, maybe a semester or two. Add to that the fact that apparently they are not accepting admissions for spring at all, and I'm a very unhappy panda about the how situation.

- In good non-game news, I finally got my diplomas and certificates in the mail. I now actually have the paper that says I'm awesome and a game artist, respectivley. This project of course the method for proving that I'm awesome as a game artist.