Developer Journal 7

Over the last few weeks I've worked on the following:

1. re-enabling serialization code that I disabled when I ported my code from Linux to Windows,
2. separating code into dynamic link libraries to increase compile and linking speeds,
3. reorganizing physics code so I can replace it with Bullet,
4. reorganizing graphics code so I can replace with Ogre and
5. cleaning up messy code.

Each thing that I did seemed to bring unexpected challenges. Boost Serialization slowed compiling and linking speeds considerably. Dynamic Link Libraries caused crashes when when I called functions that crossed between the Dynamic Link Libraries and the program. I kept breaking things when I reorganized the physics, graphics and other messy code. I was able to reduce one of the code files from approximately 10,000 lines to 3,000. That was nice.

The population keeps dying out but I don't know why. My focus today is to develop some code to diagnose what's going on to figure out how to get the population to keep going. I'm thinking about tracking neural network input, output, movement, eating and mating statistics.