Ok, I have a whole bunch of software I’m trying to wrangle into shape for a release within the next few days (before the end of the month). I would be doing this right now but I am sleepy and feel more like rambling than coding. So, here’s what I’ve been working on:

• is getting a revamp to support gz compression in its local cache. This will in theory take up a lot less space if you like downloading lots of books. Because I’m using compression now though, it means that the files can no longer be opened directly by the reader software (or text editor of whatever you want to read it in) so I am altering the functionality so that books will be decompressed on demand to a new file. A side benefit to this is that the new file can be given a nice name, like "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", rather than the rather crummy Gutenberg filename, "advsh12.txt". A bad thing is that I have to work out how to decide when to purge decompressed files so that all that space saved by using compression doesn’t just get used up anyway.
• has had quite a few improvements, but no real changes to functionality. I was planning to get bookmarks working well but that might have to wait until the next release
• troubles me… I am reluctant to add features because I am constantly considering a major rewrite, in order to support complex formatting and hyperlinking. But then who needs complex formatting for the average novel? It’s a tricky decision, and largely the reason that progress on Book Reader is so slow.
• - the first windows application I ever wrote, basically a FTP/HTTP downloader. very basic, fairly unoriginal, but something I have spent an hour or two working on lately. It was buggy, had been for years, and that was bugging me. Now it seems to work fine.
• JujuSketch… a nice little app that is waiting for a plan. I haven’t decided where it’s going to go yet, and therefore the poor thing doesn’t even get its own page.
• - not working on it!
• is not expiring so no hurry with this one, but I would like to clean up the syntax a little and make it a little more user-friendly
• yadda yadda yadda

Since all my posted software is about to expire I think it’s time I stopped faffing about with and actually updated the software I’m theoretically publishing.

It’s a pity, because realtime 3D stuff can be truly fun, and as previous posts have indicated I think there is in fact a real hole in space simulation software at the moment. You can get "accurate" celestial software where all the planets are where they should be but you don’t get to have any fun zooming about, and then there are games which don’t bother trying to offer real space flight, rather a mish mash of Star Wars and combat flight sim dogfighting. Surely there’s a lot of middle ground here to be explored? Oh well, maybe in a parallel universe an industrious and focused version of me is putting the finishing touches on a genre redefining space game/sim. In this world I think I’d better update my software before my tiny band of users get justifiably annoyed.

Update: But then again…

According to this article, shareware gaming may not be dead, and in fact may be making a comeback… This is such a wierd area, since PopCap Games [according to the article] has gathered some 1 million registrations for the type of product that I’m sure can be found for free elsewhere on the net. I guess it’s really a matter of choosing a value for your product and expecting a percentage of people to pay [Obviously marketing and word of mouth are extremely relevant here too] Compare this kind of business model with the amazing flash games at www.orisinal.com, which are all free, and serve mainly as an advertisement for the talents of the author (and as a way to drive up traffic to the site).

Obviously I am determined to throw all my time away revisiting the fancy-pants world of realtime 3D, in spite of the fact that I have inferior hardware and old fashioned skills. The Dalek pictured on the right is an example of ‘flaring’ on hilights, with placements calculated mathematically. It’s fairly expensive computationally, checking every single triangle rendered for whether it is angled so as to reflect a hilight. Today I made it also take the local curvature of the surface into account, so the size of the flares on the little hemispheres of our shiny Dalek will be reduced in future.

The degree to which 3D hardware has advanced almost scares me more than it impresses me… new cards can execute a little program for every pixel [or every fragment of a pixel], and still render bajillions of triangles per second. I guess the bottom line is that it doesn’t hurt to try to get things running fast and pretty on previous generation hardware (ie my GeForce2), but I probably shouldn’t kill myself implementing some effect that would be a piece of cake with access to vertex and pixel shaders.

Cosmos

Have just watched the first 2 episodes of the Cosmos DVD. Carl Sagan was an amazing guy, who even now, with hokey effects and bad hair, can actually move me when he talks about stuff. It makes the stuff I’m doing with George seem such small potatoes compared to his introductory journey in the "ship of our imagination"

Here are the remnants of a large number of Tie Fighters after being blown to bits in a session of . After flying around shooting things for a while I noticed that the frame rate was starting to drop, and wondered how many bits and pieces were still spinning off into the void. So, invoking the god-like power of the programmer, I collected them all into one spot and fused them into a dense junk ball. It’s pretty isn’t it? It’s got about a zillion polygons in it, and having them all on screen like this makes the system run like a remarkably slow dog.

Slim Pickings

The search for a decent [and playable] space sim continues… What I’ve been looking at ranges from pretty ordinary to downright awful. Is the genre dead? Don’t people think "space ships" when they think of video games? Or maybe I’m just showing my age here. If I don’t find one soon George may find itself back in number one position [on my project list]. It really needs a new name though.

My solemn promise of what will NOT be featured in a space game of my creation, assuming I go ahead with this [which I won’t, because it’s a terrible waste of resources and how the hell am I ever going to make any money working on a big project like this, but hypothetically…]:

• Viscous space - Any externally applied acceleration [or deceleration] will have a credible explanation.
• Space ships designed to look like some kind of metal animal painted grey and trimmed with yellow black danger stripes.
• Pixel sized stars that actually jiggle when you move your view point - Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it isn’t important.
• A plot which sets you up as a rookie pilot who inexeplicably gets sent out on very tedious missions against people with political differences
• Bad voice actors playing your recruiter/commander/wingman and talking that stupid generic tough talk without a trace of irony.
• More proper nouns than is absolutely necessary - If you’re like me, you rapidly glaze over whenever the talking head representing the CO starts yapping about how the rebel Zirconian Alliance, who are flying Les Miserables class military transports broke away from the Aardvarkian Federation…
• Onboard computers that are so smart they can show you the enemy ship from any angle in full color; they can tell you its shield status with less than a 1% error margin; they can show you where to aim… and yet they can’t aim for you!