I’ve posted a new article, on my recent endeavors with sound. I also made some cosmetic changes to the site. Be sure to let me know here via comments what you think.
The link can be found at http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg
I’ve written my latest article for the CRPG site. You can read it at http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg
Been keeping busy. I had a brand-new hard drive fail on me, so I ended up having to reinstall my OS. Bleh. For the record, it wasn’t Vista’s fault, it was Seagate’s! I love that they make ME pay for the shipping back of their broken drive to get a warranty replacement…
Fortunately, all my game files were stored on a different drive, so no losses there. Still, time to start thinking about a backup system…
Oh, been playing Bioshock as well. Good game, but hardly “innovative” or “interactive”… not many reviews of real worth online for it right now, most seem to be written by drooling fanboys who are incapable of rational and unbiased analysis.
I’ve finished with version 0.30, and put it up on the demo page on my domain site at http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg.
It’s not as exciting, I’m sure, since it’s mostly just information, but it’s the kind of data you’ll be glad to have… especially when you’re debugging the hard stuff.
I will definitely be changing the party overview screen… it’s a bit messy and confusing looking in terms of the layout of data.
One thing you’re not seeing on these screens that you would are the status icons for various spells and effects that are on characters. That won’t get tested until I actually have those effects in.
One particular concern I have is that the implementation of the status screens, along with some subsidiary code to perform other functions, took up around 3 kilobytes. Having to display disparate information burns memory like mad, unfortunately. I think the more interactive screens will be less memory-consumptive, but I’m still hoping I can get everything before version 0.70 (combat) in under 16k of codespace. I’m at 11k now…
If I’m really desperate, I can always segment off a large amount of code to disk, and, for example, only load combat code when combat’s actually going. But this is incredibly complicated to do; I’m hoping to avoid that!
Greetings,
I’ve decided to start a development blog for my vintage computing project. I will still continue to write the occasional article for my original site (http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg), but also offer “daily” updates on what’s going on, so you don’t think I’m doing nothing at all.
I may diverge into other topics once in awhile, but I figure you’re not reading this to know what’s going on in my personal life, so I’ll keep the interludes to a minimum.
Right now, I’m well on the way to version 0.3 of the demo, with fully operating statistic screens. I had some initial trouble setting up the control system, but it’s working now. I’m designing each screen one at a time and checking the results before doing the next one, hence the long delays. It’s also been a busy two weeks; I had my birthday as well as my mom and brother’s this month, and I’m getting a new computer this week, so I’ll call it a good deal if I get to version 0.3 by the end of the month.
I had one nasty surprise for me last night… corrupted Excel spreadsheets, two of my most pivotal ones. I’m not sure how it happened; the files were stored on a flash USB drive, so possibly something got damanged in transit.
Regardless, I found Excel 2002 to be pretty useless at recovery. It recovered nothing but raw data and broken formulas, and chopped out all the formatting. I used Office 2007 at work and found to my pleasant surprise that it recovered 90-95% of the data, formulas and formatting, and it should be a simple matter to restore the missing bits.
Maybe using a CSV system, though, is in order… my spreadsheets allow me to save a lot of time with my design changes, and losing them is a serious stumbling block.
