A horrid sleepless night, woke about 4 times due to random small noises, and at one point away for 4 hours or so. My stomach again torments me. I rose weary and groggy.
In the night I realised I had a small problem with Gunstorm and the latest engine update. Steam will sync the Options.txt file upon start and exit, to keep it up to date, but if synced at the start, it would overwrite any custom changes made by the user before the game was run. Editing these options can be used by expert users to customise the game intimately - most particularly screen resolution. If not synced (as in previous games) then this information may be overwritten with each update. This isn't too bad, as these things are only overwritten if a forced update to 'verify' files is done, and these tweaks are easily remade anyway, but it's still not ideal. Here, as in Taskforce, we have mission progress to keep track of; not something we would want to lose.
So some data needs to be persistent, and some editable. So in the night I worked out a solution: two files, one editable which is never saved, so can be freely toyed with, and one for settings which is always saved and up to date. This solves many long-standing problems, as some settings like screen resolution shouldn't really be saved anyway, and it would be best if other data like level progress isn't editable or visible to players at all.
In the morning I added this feature and it worked, so it's now part of the Hector v1.32 engine. I'll add this to my other games when I update those.
These changes took most of the morning, including uploading them to Steam and testing them in situ. One other benefit is that the persistent file doesn't have to be present to start with. It will be saved out at the end, and read from if it is there, but if not, defaults used and a new file created. This suits cloud-synching perfectly.
After those changes, I converted and uploaded the Gunstorm II videos. In the afternoon I put Trax together and released that on my itch.io channel, as planned. At about 5pm, Gunstorm was approved for release, so I made the store live and linked to it, and scheduled the new gameplay videos.
These jobs feel like a never ending treadmill, but such is life in creative works like this. I'll soon prepare things for Gunstorm II, then updates to some older games.
Paul is here; staying for a few days while his partner is away and his boat is being serviced. I'm still reading the Patrick Stewart book and feeling inspired by it. I told myself at one point "Yes! By the time I'm 40 I'll have 'made it' too!" - but of course that was many years ago. Perhaps I'll be a breakthrough success at 60-something then. I wish I could relax, or eat, or both.
