2024

 A lot has changed since my last post here, yet much has stayed the same. I am still working at the local waterpark, but the Corpos cut most everyone for the off-season this time around. Until about March I will be mostly focused on current but sparse AWS DevOps contract work, fixing up a few things around my house, trading stocks (lol), and game development as far as productive things. 

On the fun side of things; I have not purchased any more arcade games, but none of my games have broken down since the last time I worked on them. I was basically forced to build a new computer in September of this year. I had decided to get myself a new Nvidia RTX 4060 card and it worked great for a while despite seeing an obvious bottleneck at the CPU and/or other components. Well, for about 3 days anyway. After running some Unreal5 tests the machine bluescreened and then never acted right again. One highlight was after many attempts finally getting the machine to boot and looking at the Device Manager section in Windows 10 to see that the processor entry was completely empty. I realized that the newest Intel CPUs are "generation 14" and I was running 4th. Simply replacing the motherboard and PSU didn't seem viable; at least for something I would enjoy for much longer. 

 Despite the voltage/heat weirdness that can occur with this generation of CPU and corresponding motherboard I've been really happy with my setup after making sure I wasn't burning up cores via a hardware monitor and watching a YouTube video that made sense on how to properly configure the BIOS for my motherboard to sacrifice a bit of power for sake of not cooking things. It's a bit insane how fast and power-hungry these new Intel chips run, so there's really no reason to even have the chip running that hot. It's not as if any game out now is really going to care! Cyberpunk 2077 running with 14th gen I7, 64GB fastest RAM, and the new video card was completely awesome to finally experience. I finished my 2nd play through of it last week and will probably have to check out the DLC content next year. Doom II Retraced on this setup is also amazing, and I hope to try VR soon once a friend lends me a headset. 

Duck Slide Range 3.0 was released earlier this month! I had to remove it from Google Play store because of numerous reasons. The short version is it barely made any money compared to the iOS release. That update introduced a new area with some new levels. I am going to try to push another update before New Years that will mainly be scripting changes and should add the ability for players to re-start the game on higher levels based on previous levels cleared rather than having to always start from the beginning. 

I recently had to re-do the micro-SD card inserted in my "EverDrive" cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The original became corrupted after trying to update firmware and ROM contents. I lost a couple of save games, but kept my most important at the time and got Mario Adventure 3 running. This is probably the best hack ever of Super Mario Brothers 3 featuring new areas, suits, and all sorts of craziness. Difficult, but I've been having a lot of fun with this one. 

Speaking of NES I recently attended my cousin's birthday party where he handed me his old NES to refurbish. I may make a blog with pictures here of how I do the whole process because I find myself explaining it a lot and while I know that sort of thing is fairly well documented on the internet, in my opinion there can never be too many pictures or descriptions when it comes to things like fixing PCBs. 

Interactive Dreaming GUI Update

06.12.11 Note: I just heard back from someone with iFrotz. A new version has been released that addresses the missing elements, but the clicking on compass directions issue is still being addressed.

06.13.11 Note: Screenshot added of the prototype playing in iFrotz version 1.5.3.

With two out of three of the games beaten that I mentioned in an older post, I have been working more on my new project in between my full-time job and playing some Cryptozookeeper. I'm trying to settle on a final layout so that I do not have to keep going back and changing things as I write the actual story code. I have it looking very close to what I want it to be when I'm done. I just need to add a few more buttons and make a few more minor changes.

Here is a screenshot of the new layout thus far, running in Gargoyle..

Both of the status bars have been re-sized and re-arranged to the right of the screen. The scenery picture has been centered a bit more over the story text. All elements of the UI draw correctly when re-sizing the interpreter window.

Owning a fancy Apple device would be nice (I'm not quite the Apple hater that I was back when I created Corporate Doom), but I simply can't afford just about anything recently made by the company. However, I am trying to ensure that the game plays well on Ipad and Iphone, because of the current popularity of such devices. Who knows? Maybe I'll own one myself one day. In the meantime, I must rely on others to test the game on these pricey platforms. Luckily, the tester that helped me trouble-shoot Hallow Eve owns a Mac and an iPad, and he has tested the prototype on both.

Here is the prototype loaded in Spatterlight for Mac..

I'm satisfied with this. It looks exactly the way I expected and intended. Now let's see what it looks like in Zoom for Mac..

We have a line drawn here I've never seen before. However, it's in a non-annoying place, so I'm not bothered with it at all. This is fine. 

One note the tester gave me was that in Zoom you have to double-click the compass directions to remove, while this only requires one click in Spatterlight. Again, no biggie. I can live with that. Alright, now something I was really curious about; the game loaded in iFrotz for iPad..

Uh-oh. That's not good. As you can see, my meters are missing in this version. It's as if iFrotz had no problem with displaying anything that displayed graphics from files, but it could not draw "primitive" words, boxes, or rectangles at all. The tester also reported to me that if he tried to use the compass to move in this version, it would start to bring up the virtual keyboard, then completely crash the system. 

From what I understand, iFrotz is the only .gblorb interpreter for iPhone or iPad. I have read that glulx support in iFrotz is "still new and fragile", though I've also seen some recent updates. I'm going to point this out to the iFrotz bug-squashers in hopes that it will be addressed in the next update. 

EDIT: As noted above,  iFrotz 1.5.3 addresses the graphics issue seen in a previous version. Now all I have to wait for is the action of clicking elements in the UI to perform functions to be working. Here's an image of the prototype running in 1.5.3...

In the meantime, I'm going to carry on with the game as-is while testing in Gargoyle for Windows and Linux. Adding the last few UI elements, taking and adding more photographs for scenes, and setting up some more game mechanics. I've been writing the story and plot themselves separately in a word processor, instead of just jumping in head-first as I did with Hallow Eve. I welcome any recommendations, comments, or criticisms any of you reading this may have.