Ok, here is the scenario - just got something quite complex done, before lunch even. After lunch, do the easy part, and do some UI tweaking.
The easy part was showing four specific sprites on screen.
Which didn't happen.
After being well pleased with myself during lunch having gotten the complex part working just fine in very short time, a few hours after I felt dismayed and frustrated.
Three hours spent to no avail trying to figure out why four f*cking sprites did not want to display. Tried everything, wrote tests, went through the code line by line. And then packed up my laptop, shut down my office desktop, and headed home. Defeated.
With a stop to the local liquor-store mind you. Hey, it is a Friday and I deserve it!
Anyhow, after dinner and a couple of Jäger and beers later, I cracked up the laptop again and I think the Ballmer Effect kicked in (google it).
What I spent hours trying to figure out at the office suddenly became apparent...
My routine for creating new single-frame sprites expected a height parameter through a imported datatype, which the dataset for my new sprites did not set. Unlike most other sprites in the project, that are multiframe and have their own multi-frame routine where the height is simply set to -1 to keep the aspect of the original image, bypassing any need to set height.
A sprite with height zero (= not set) do not to show...
Doh!
Now I just need get this little project presentable before a board-meeting on Wednesday. Plug in some multiplayer stuff between the host and clients. Should be easy, everything is under control! I know what I am doing!
