Another full day working on Taskforce. Occasionally tearful about poor Cat. Also had to go to Tesco for the weekly shop, which was very busy, as one might expect for the day after a Bank Holiday.
I started the day by finding the exact email I sent to Andrew Williams to find the day when we found Cat, so that I could record the day of her finding and her death for posterity. I have a file of memorable dates, a short list of big life occasions, and Cat deserves these two entries. It seems that we found her on the evening of October 13th 2003, not 2004 as I first thought, so I've backdated my blogged dates. I've saved all of my emails from November 2000 to 2014, it feels nice to look back and have these. Those, and this blog are such great things, far better than the awfulness of 'social media'. I will never fondly look back at Facebook posts. Will anyone?
By chance, in one old email, I found had a list of improvements for Taskforce, some feedback from the very early days. It seems that I have implemented most of those ideas.
After that, many big changes to the game today. I'm determined to plough through this and get it completed:
1. First I redesigned the in-game icons, and later in the day designed the main interface menu icons. These are now a nice slim yellow, these look more slick than the 2004 blue ones:
2. Added the option to select units with keys F1 to F12 (partly because there are 12 units so these keys seemed ideal). On the equip screen these keys will also Duck/Stand the troops if you have selected them already.
3. Updated the game demo. Taskforce always had a demo, and I'm tempted to add this to Steam, my first game to include a free game demo. I've had to add links to the Steam store and updated the demo text.
4. Added Steam support inside the game engine so it's ready to go on the platform.
5. Re-rendered some of the music to slightly improve the quality. The downside is that my music software has changed since 2004, so some of the audio effects no longer exist. It's not vital, but it would be more work than I'd hoped to recreate the original music.
6. Added "2/6 AP's" text to the Duck/stand in-game text, alerting the player to the number of Action Points for this action.
7. Formatted more Steam specific graphics for the Store page.
8. Changed priority memory allocation for the Vertex Buffers, and speed tested this. There was a very slight speed difference, so slight it might not be significant or due to the memory, but at least now, the graphics driver should be in charge of the best memory to select.
9. Created a new Taskforce Model Viewer program, which might be useful.
10. Changes to the Try Hard map; untested.
And several other things. At 2pm I went to Tesco for the weekly shop. Mum came with me, which was helpful as I had a lot, perhaps five bags to carry. Without her help, I would need to make two trips per week. We bought 5kg of rice because they had no smaller bags, but I suppose this is cheaper in the long run. The whole shop has a one-way system which makes it look like my old game The Challenge of the Matrix, actually my first ever Amiga game, back from December 1992.
I don't have any images of the game at all, but a quick Google search reveals that an awful lot of other people do! Amazed that these ancient games are still around.
Have barely stopped today. It is now 21:38, post-bath. Time to speak to Deb. How I miss seeing her in these Covid times.
