This Isn't As Easy As It Looks (Sometimes)

Frustration.

I had hoped to have announced a release date by now for Beta 1.0 of The Office Park. While that announcement is still forthcoming (May 10, 2009), it's only an aside to todays post. Here's the issue:

For the last several weeks I have been making some major gameplay changes to The Office Park, some will be seen with this release and some won't be seen until the final release with the campaign (it will all be clear when the time comes). Up until last week, progress had been coming along smoothly and I had been nearing the end of the largest changes. The plan was to finish up the gameplay changes by last Thursday, have a compile for the Beta version by Friday, and then spend Saturday and Sunday generating the nav mesh and enduring all of the related tedium involved in editing all of the fine details by hand for the Nth time. The simple fact that I'm making a post about this should say that something went wrong. I present a timeline:

April 27, Monday - Release date decided for May 10, with early release for SDP Community as soon as the 5th.
April 30, Thursday - Major changes complete and ready to compile. Early tests were favorable, so map was saved as a separate file titled The Office Park Beta, in order to facilitate Beta-specific changes without the need to undo said changes in the final version after release of the Beta. New map compiled overnight.
May 1, Friday - The compile completed. I launch the game client in the twenty minutes before work to quickly run through the map and get the nav generation started, but the map doesn't launch; strange. I close the game and try several more launches before opening the console on one attempt and seeing what looks like memory errors. I attribute the error to a bad compile and set the map to compile again while I head off to work.
Friday Night - The second compile completed with no serious errors, but the map still won't load. I'm not sure what causes this, but it seems to have something to do with renaming the map. A similar issue occured before the previous release of the map where I appended "Demo" to the end of the filename, but in that case I had assumed that something else was at play. I reverted to using the original file and compiled.
May 2, Saturday - This compile seemed to load with no major issues. I found a couple of oversights in my playthrough as well as a number of issues related to the navmesh as was to be expected. Not to be discouraged, I set the navmesh to generate while I went to work.
Saturday Night - My computer crashed (or was shut down, I won't speculate) while I was gone. Annoyed, I set the nav mesh to generate a second time overnight.
May 3, Sunday - I have high hopes this time as I set the navmesh to generate in the morning. Returning home from work around 5PM, I have an earlier start working on the map than usual. I open the game and zoom around with the new nav mesh for a minute before restarting the map for a playtest. This time I recieve some new errors and start right in the center of the map. I quickly realize that there's a problem with the nav mesh - one of the sections that previously worked only did so because the navmesh was broken in that spot (and assumed there was no object where there is now an object that the player must jump over). Not a major issue, since it seemed easy enough to fix by hand, but it destroyed the map flow from starting point to saferoom and needed to be fixed immediately. Toying around with nav area creation didn't help, as the object was rotated out of line with the map's grid, and wasn't treated correctly by the navmesh.

I had plenty of time at this point to perform another compile to fix the issue, which I did, only to find that adding a Clip block over the prop - which was necessary, but must be done precisely - solved the issue of the navmesh finding the object, but further broke the map in that the player could no longer jump over the object.

I ended the night with another compile, which will hopefully fix this issue, and this is where I stand. The problem is that I've lost several days of detail work to a small handful of minor, but very annoying issues, and I've yet to see how the map plays with the changes because of this.

Hopefully my next update will be more exciting.