My first playthough finally came to an end. All was going on pretty well until I got attacked by a mad preacher who proceeded to hack to me to death with his crowbar after I unsucessfully tried to talk to him.
Survival time : 1 day, 8.49 hours
My first playthough finally came to an end. All was going on pretty well until I got attacked by a mad preacher who proceeded to hack to me to death with his crowbar after I unsucessfully tried to talk to him.
Survival time : 1 day, 8.49 hours
what weapon did you use most?
i played shit of it waaaaay back and i remember that there was no weapon like that big branch
At least implement stuffing kids into shopping carts/selling them and I won't tell people that you just ripped off Roller Blade and removed the roller blades so no one would notice.Wow, this is impressive. And just about everything in this seems apropos to the setting! Everything, that is, except smooth, unbroken surfaces to roll on
And Now for Something Completely Different...
Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. Ours was a little bittersweet as we watched Canada Day festivities on CBC live from afar. We miss our other home at times like these. I also suited up for vacuuming the 100+ year old crawlspace beneath our house. Darkness, cramped and hard to reach spaces, awkward equipment, and limited breathing. I imagine submarine mechanic work is worse, but not by much.
Back at the office, I finally cracked open the NEO Scavenger mobile code to see where Tiago left off. He was in the process of converting NEO Scavenger mobile to work on desktop, to see if we could replace the aging Flash engine with this Haxe one.
So far, it sort of works. One could already actually play the straight mobile version on PC if they chose. The UI would have all the mobile stuff in place, and would behave just like the mouse was a finger touching the screen. However, no keyboard. And no mods.
Tiago made a fair amount of progress getting it prepped for loading mods, but it's in a sort of netherland right now. The strict memory optimizations we made are playing havoc with the old way of loading images and data. And a lot of plumbing needs to be restored or rewritten to intercept asset loads and redirect them to appropriate base or mod sources.
And ideally, all of this would be done in a way to avoid breaking the mobile code. In other words, the same code base generating all targets. I have a few doubts about that as I'm now looking at the data loading/modding code, but we'll see. It's only been one day.
What does this mean for the space prototype? A temporary delay. I've always sort of pictured rereleasing NEO Scavenger Haxe version before the space prototype, just as a way of saying thanks to all the fans for their support. And I still want to do this.
However, it'll depend on how much work is involved in the restoration. I can stand a few weeks delay. Even a month or so. But I don't want space prototype to fade away from neglect. For now, let's see how this goes!
try againI find it difficult to focus on this game. Tried 2 times, and I ended up with the same result...
Stuff's Gettin' Better Everyday
Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. I'd say it was a pretty good one here. Nice weather. Nice dinners. A trip to the zoo. And a night where we were able to socialize with grown-ups. Yay!
Back in dev land, I found myself thinking of the today's title, a quote from the Postman, when prepping today's devlog. NEO Scavenger desktop version is getting better everyday.
As you can see in today's image, gone are the fat mobile buttons and slide-out tray that hid several of the action buttons like Run and Hide. The cursor mode toggle stays put when you click it, instead of the mobile fly-out for easier tapping near screen edge. And several of the mobile-only text labels are now omitted from the desktop build.
As part of all this, I decided to create a separate class for storing desktop UI coordinates, since it was starting to become a real mess in there. Between multiple screen layouts and platforms, there were just too many combos of too many values making maintenance a pain.
Now, there is a desktop and mobile class where I can define sensible values for everything without having branching code and exceptions.
It's nearly identical to the old UI now, with a few minor improvements (like fatter scroll buttons on the log and attack modes, and other areas where it doesn't hurt).
Next steps include:
Only one of those is trivial work, so plenty more to do!
- Fix remaining UI errors on main menu.
- Revisit the modding code and see if I can resurrect that, now that the game loads completely in desktop mode.
- Check non-default UI modes (4:3 and BIG UI modes). (Big, in particular, hasn't been maintained since mobile, and likely is broken.)
try againI find it difficult to focus on this game. Tried 2 times, and I ended up with the same result...
After a few dev posts later...: http://bluebottlegames.com/content/stuffs-gettin-better-everyday
I started compiling a changelog to use in the announcement for when this launches, and I think it's going to be a pretty big hit
After a few dev posts later...: http://bluebottlegames.com/content/stuffs-gettin-better-everyday
Many dev posts later...: https://bluebottlegames.com/content/help-screen-audio-and-aa
I started compiling a changelog to use in the announcement for when this launches, and I think it's going to be a pretty big hit
Hey Folks! I think we may be, dare I say it, done? As of about 3pm today, I was able to compile and run NEO Scavenger Haxe edition on all three platforms without crashes!
90% of my day was spent futilely poking the code and flailing about, rebuilding the entire dll and game projects each time, hoping to see the needle move even a little. I even got down and dirty into some byte allocation/deallocation code, thinking I could wiggle past the malloc bug plaguing me on OSX/Linux.
In the end, I stumbled back over an old (2015!) thread in which someone else was having a similar issue. Only this time, I noticed something I missed before: Lars Doucet was mentioned as posting a fix to the exact issue I was having!
It turns out that my project code, being frozen at Lime version 2.9.1, just missed Lars's embedded audio fix in 3.0.0. Changing a Bytes(data) call to a Bytes() call followed by Bytes.Set(data) was all it needed. Changing that deep inside the dll and recompiling solved all the issues.
Well hallelujah!
Further evidencing the fact that I am just a past-life incarnation of Lars, following his every step
Anyway, assuming there isn't an explosion over the weekend or anything, I plan to compile some release builds of the game and begin the uploading process. Definitely as a test build on the BBG site, and maybe also in the test branch on Steam, too. I won't post anywhere else until a few folks have tried it without exploding, since I don't want to replace the only working builds on GOG/Humble with broken ones.
We're almost there, folks. Have a good weekend, and prepare for an interesting week!
Sneak Peek
Hey Folks! Got a bit of a sneak peek for you today.
I've uploaded the newest "test" build of NEO Scavenger, v1.3.0 to the BBG website. And anyone with access to the full version on this site can click the "test" download links to get it. This is the Haxe engine port I've been working on over the last little while, and features a number of improvements and fixes, and should feel more like a native app than the old Flash one. (Namely, because it is a native app now!)
Anyway, feel free to try it out now if you'd like. I'll be uploading the builds to the remaining stores tomorrow (Steam, GOG, Humble), and making a "big deal" announcement once that's done.
If you run into any issues with it, do let me know!