First, a trip to Castle Park Arts Centre to collect my three paintings. I exchanged a few words with the nice artist helping with the process.
At home I updated Future Pool and Future Snooker with the new game engine changes as planned. Charu sent a Flatspace IIk save which exhibited the 'mine bug', which is useful but I couldn't find how to replicate the error, which is the crucial thing. There are so few instances where the shot vanishes, and all should make the sprite vanish too.
One line caught my eye, an 'if' statement that referenced a pointed-to variable like the deletesprite routine. It would be bizarre if that was the cause of the problem, as if the statement itself was bypassed out of fear of a crash; no that's too bizarre, but still, I've added a NULL check. I'll refrain from updating the program for a few weeks. This bug is not urgent, it may have been around for years so cannot be serious.
I'm tired of this programming. I analysed my Steam stats today. The total number of lifetime players for my Steam games are: Flatspace IIk: 2285, Radioactive: 72, Yinyang: 25, Future Snooker: 54, Future Pool: 41, Flatspace: 2410, Taskforce: 31, SFXEngine: 25, Gunstorm: 14, Gunstorm: 13, Argus: 161. Of course, the Gunstorm games are the newest. It's sad that so few have played my games, but my task is to make them as well as I can and not worry about much else. I was reminded today that I designed all of these games 20 years ago when I was a very different person. Now I'd do everything differently. Then, I hoped for success from my games, something popular, good, and profitable. Now I only want to do my best; to create something special, in an artistic and emotional sense.
Artist and scientist are the same job. Both form connections between things to create a magical spark, a spark enjoyed by those who later see that connection too. Science, however, has great prestige, and even touted as worthy and a good job for the country by the government; and art a poor job, or even a pointless waste of time. How both opinions be true? Science is thought to have a practical value (though of course, many discoveries do not at first). Art, however, is rarely seen in practical terms; yet it is as practical as science, if not treated with the same rigour as science is today.
