A long day updating the engines for Future Pool and Future Snooker. It's time consuming and exacting work, removing old code and replacing the exact parts with the newer version, and about 40% of the program needs replacing in this way. The general effect for this should be zero, apart from fixing lots of tiny bugs found over the past 5 years. It will make it easier to add things or update in future. These changes make everything in line with my latest standards. Any updates or changes must start with this, so it's something of a file-keeping exercise, but an important one.
It was exactly 5 years ago today that I started work on both games to prepare them for a Steam release; and that release happened half-a-year later, on October 16th in Future Pool's case. The original version 1.00 of Future Pool took 16 days to create; graphics, sound, and all. How times have changed! Since then I've put months of work into both games, mostly engine updates like this rather than major fixes or improvements.
There is only one visible change so far, cropping the display horizontally for wide screens, as is my new standard for setting the screen. This makes the game look much better, bigger, on 16:9 screens.
This game, like all of my games, was developed for a 5:4 screen (and the 5:4 world of the early 21st century). When remastered for Steam I simply widened the display, adding what could be thought of as 'black bars' to the left and right. Of course, there is data there, not actual black bars, but the perspective was adjusted to zoom out by the correct amount. Now it zooms in instead, fixing the width rather than height.
New options like aspect fixing, 'robust' initialisation, a full European/Latin character set, and countless other engine improvements are in there, though they don't affect the gameplay.
I'll at least add a new high-res font, but I'm unsure whether to make any gameplay improvements. I can't really spare the time to do that, but it could do with one or two, such as control options.
