A rubbish sleepless night of stomach pain.
I dream of going to Wales, a lakeside holiday area, with others pon some sort of coach trip. At leaving time, I dash for the bus, but find I'm the only one of my party, then discover it's the wrong bus! I'm taken to a city, and get off the first stop. I enter a hotel and ask what I should do, will there be any more buses? I ask if I should take a taxi and they agree, then they and I wear strange headsets to talk to the taxi company and to each other. I wonder why I'm not phoning the others, calling Deb to let her know where I am. I left the hotel and walked down the very busy street, the road full of cars. It reminds me of Stockport, near the gallery. I see a huge limousine and wonder if I should just hire that, knowing, somehow, that I have £1,000 to spend, so why not?
Then I awoke. I think the dream is about art. I think my unconscious wants me to paint, the only times when I feel contented.
I got up late, and decided to work on Roton, one of my oldest PC games. I want to resurrect these old games, to at least make them available, even if they aren't artistically satisfying or forwarding my future... yet, this game is, in retrospect, one of my most surrealistic. A spaceship battles giant apples, atoms, umbrellas and all sorts of odd things.
The source hasn't been touched since 2001, not even on my prior PC! So it was a challenge to get it compiled. Visual Studio has a habit of setting everything up in a certain way, for 64-bit Windows, the latest kit with unicode text, and all C++ checks in place, which means old programs like this throw up hundreds of errors, most of which need compiler switches to fix. Roton was my second ever PC game, and my first full-screen DirectX game because my first game (Thermonuclear Domination) was more of a programming test that ran in a Window. It was first complete at the end of 1999 (I was working on Arcangel at the time). The commercial verison, bundled with Trax (my first 3D game) and Martian Rover Patrol, ran on CD-ROM only, streaming the music in little chunks, which is totally unnecessary today.
The code is ancient. By 4pm I was struggling with getting it working, but by 6pm it was running, and now has been upgraded from DirectX5 to DirectX7, with full wav music (actually, a new master, recorded from the SY-85 just before I sold it last year), and optional resolutions (it will play in a box in the top-left corner if 640x480 isn't possible).
Taking a day or two to resurrect Roton is fine. If I didn't do it, it would probably never see the light of day again. I'll finish it tomorrow, perhaps update the graphics a bit, then put it on itch, and get to work on Martian Rover Patrol. It would be nice, one day, to remake Arcangel and release it on Steam, but I need money for this.
