Well, tomorrow I head off to NH to stay with my folks. And from there, we're meeting Jody (bro-in-law) who's helping with the booth, loading up the minivan, and heading to PAX in Boston. I'm starting to get a little nervous. I'm not too worried about the game, as it's been live for months now with few major issues. I'm just worried I might forget something :)
I've just finished uploading new test build 1.04, which is a minor patch that fixes several bugs, including one which was causing hex resources to disappear.
Had another tedious slog through tax stuff today. This time, it was assembling, scanning, and uploading docs for my accountant. Since the due date for documents will be during my PAX trip, I want to get that squared away while everything is at my fingertips. The good news is that this should mean I'm free of this responsibility later in the year when I usually stress about it.
A good chunk of the day was consumed by tax stuff today. I had to run into town to visit the bank and do some paperwork, and while that's never fun, it's unavoidable. The good news is that I think I'm in good hands for this tax year, with a good advisor/accountant. I'm going to need it, what with NEO Scavenger's launch causing increased GST scrutiny.
Hope everyone had a good week. Our trip to Seattle was a great success. The weather was unseasonably warm and sunny, the food amazing, and we enjoyed exploring the various parks and neighborhoods. Some very cool game stores there, too!
Now that I'm back, I have a pile of emails and messages to catch-up on, so I apologize if you're waiting for me to reply. I should be able to get back on top of things soon.
What with the v1.03 build upload today, I forgot to mention that I'll be on vacation next week. From tomorrow morning until Thursday night (19th), I'll be away from the office.
I'll still try to check-in periodically to see if anything's critical, but I may be slow to respond during that time.
Hope everyone has a good weekend and subsequent week. See you on the 20th!
Kaaven and Entharion have recently been plugging away at the NEO Scavenger Wiki, and they've made a lot of progress! (Check out the swanky new theme, for example!)
However, they could still use a hand, and asked if I could put the word out. If you're handy with wiki markup, know how to read the xml file in the game, or even just have some time to write/edit, feel free to introduce yourself!
I think I managed to fix the trackpad mouse issues mentioned yesterday.
After trying a few iterations of a custom event queue, it appeared that the issue was a deeper one. Namely, the button receives the mouse event before the game loop has a chance to process anything. Rather than rearchitecting the game loop, I decided to try adding a native mouse event handler directly to the button. And fortunately, it seems to work! I tried the various take and drag mouse modes, as well as the context menu, and the trackpad seems to have parity with a regular mouse.
I dug further into the mouse issue today, and it's turning out to be a weird one.
As far as I can tell, the trouble stems from the way a trackpad registers a mouse click, as compared to a normal mouse or the trackpad's button. A normal mouse click looks like this:
-register mouse button down
-process mouse button down
-register mouse button up
-process mouse button up
but a trackpad looks more like this:
-register mouse button down
-register mouse button up
-process mouse button up
Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Fortunately, I think the hard work last week nailing down booth stuff earned me a more relaxing weekend. I was able to get some R&R without stressing over the big-ticket stuff for the first time in a while.
And since I have a bit of breathing room, I decided to do a bit of code work today. I checked out some bugs on my list to see what I could repro and fix, and managed to knock out a few things.
Still plugging away at the booth/convention preparations.
I sent off my layouts to the banner printer today, and got some proofs back. They're looking good, so I've given them the "ok" to proceed, and sent payment for that.
Today was finishing off some paperwork to make the booth official. I had to sign for things like required furniture, power requirements, carpeting, signage, A/V rentals, etc. For the most part, I'm going to try and source as much of that myself as possible. As long as I can carry it in myself w/o motorized machines, I'm free to do so. And the prices for much of the equipment are lower than renting.
Today was pretty tedious. And expensive! Today was travel booking day for the upcoming show.
My first order of business was to figure out how I can get a cross-country flight from nowhere without paying an arm and a leg. Also, flying for less than 14 hours. It turns out this is a tricky prospect, as the only reliable airport to us is over 300km away.
I spoke with a new accountant this morning, recommended to me by some other indie devs. I have to say, I'm feeling much more confident after speaking with him. His familiarity with games and Steam, GST, and cross-border tax preparation leaves me thinking he may be a better choice than a bigger firm like KPMG. Vastly cheaper, too. Hopefully, I should have that choice resolved soon.
Hey folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Friday's build seems to be holding up alright. There are still some issues that need fixing, but overall, it seems to be an improvement over previous builds. I'm going to give it a bit more shakedown time to see if any other bugs fall out before promoting to default build status.
