A Little Atmosphere

Just a quick progress report: Since my last post, I've finished up the animation bug fixes I was working on, and I'm now doing a little decorating: think of it as turning Solitaire Till Dawn into a place with "a little atmosphere."

Much of this work has actually been done for a long time: selecting cardbacks, royalty images, and window backgrounds is all already working. But the user interface for the Decor window, where you can select these things, was clunky and hard to use. I spent some time on it, and I think it's better now.

By the way, there's one feature from old Solitaire Till Dawn that won't be in the next release: you won't be able to create cardbacks using your own photos. I'm sure people will want that, and it will appear in a later release. But right now I'm focussed on getting a usable release out the door and into your hands, and custom cardbacks would take too much time to implement. (You will be able to use your own photos for the window background; that's already working. Cardbacks are harder because they're small, so you'll want a nice user interface to scale and crop your image so that it fits nicely: that's the hard part.)

I am now adding the old sound effects to the new release. This is another feature I might have skipped if it would have taken very long to do, but Cocoa makes it dead simple. I've spent just part of today on it, and I'm nearly done already.

Update October 11 2013: I am retaining compatibility with Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8). Everybody who wants the new version but doesn't want to upgrade to Lion or Mountain Lion, y'all can relax. And thanks for the feedback!

Here's a chance for you to make yourself heard: I am now inclined to make this new version require at least Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) or later. I was going to make it compatible with the older Snow Leopard (10.6) as well, but there are some niceties in Lion that I'd like to take advantage of. The old Solitaire Till Dawn will run in Snow Leopard if you hand-install Rosetta (which is free from Apple), and Lion is now nearly three years old, so I think requiring at-least-Lion is not unreasonable. If you are still running Snow Leopard and you desperately want the new release to work on your current system, please leave a comment here. No promises, but I'll be listening. (If you are not using Snow Leopard, please do not respond. I assume that nearly everyone following this blog is using at-least-Lion, and I only need to hear from the exceptions. Thanks!)

Bloodied but Unbowed

Last post, I mentioned that after a difficult-but-necessary architecture change, I tested all 100 games and discovered some previously-unnoticed bugs. This little status update is to reassure you all, once again, that I'm still working on Solitaire Till Dawn, and to report that I have once again descended into the pit of monsters that is concurrent animation programming, and once again emerged victorious.

I really hate working on the animation stuff. It has to look good (and it has to just plain work), and I'm not an expert on this kind of coding. This latest bug fix took me several days of studying old code and trying to remember how it works, watching the animations fail in veeeerrrryyyy sssssslllooooowwww mmmmooootttiiiooonnn so that I could see exactly what was happening, and experimenting with fixes.

By the way: if it surprises you that I can't remember how my own code works, then you've simply never coded anything very complex yourself. Every experienced programmer knows that within three months, any code written today will become as unfamiliar as if it had been written by a Martian. That's why good programmers comment their code liberally, and write it for clarity even if they don't expect anyone else to ever see it. And I do that; but There Are Times when even that is not enough, and you wind up spending significant amounts of time trying to figure out just exactly what the hell you thought you were doing when you wrote some bit of code or other.

Anyway, I won this round. But there are still more bugs to fix, so I'm going to cut this short and get on with fixing them. Happy Autumn, everybody!