Progress against bugs -- looking positive so far

[Quasar]

Thanks to the few faithful who helped us beta test (still far fewer than I had hoped), several bugs have been or are being fixed.

The random crash bug which prompted this beta testing phase is in an uncertain state. By going through the program and increasing the size of several string buffers found to be definitely or possibly too small, and making a lot of the large ones static, I was able to increase the engine's stability. Since doing this, it has not been observed to crash by myself. This, however, is not enough testing, so more still needs to be done. A new version of the beta will be available to testers starting tonight.

Making the very large string buffers static has increased the memory usage slightly, but should improve speed and stability quite a bit. C_Printf was allocating a 10 KB buffer every time it was called. That's just too much stack overhead IMO.

Several other problems were found by accident while testing for this one. One was a problem with a certain GeForce 3 driver, which boris was able to fix by upgrading. This will become a FAQ question starting with the official beta 2 release.

More than one person found out that the new z clipping code is incompatible with the comp_floors option, which enables (most of) the old doom floor movement code. This has yet to be fixed, but will be addressed by not allowing z clipping to be on when comp_floors is on. According to SoM, it would be impractical to try to make the compatibility feature work with z clipping.

So, if you haven't come into #eternitybeta for some STRANGE reason, drop by later tonight and get the newest test beta. We'll appreciate it.