Woke late yesterday and struggled with my tasks of the day. I prepared some new parchment-like paper, repaired my broken tripod with Polymorph (I'm sure it's stronger now than when new), and many other small jobs. Most of the day was spent re-sizing the artwork for the 8 Flatspace Music Packs, as Steam have doubled the sizes for all of their Store graphics. This is a time consuming and exacting process (and very annoying to have to do, running to stand still).
Today I awoke to an email about this very subject. Steam are phasing out the old sizes, so I'll need to update all of the store artwork for my existing titles. SFXEngine and Flatspace have been updated, but the rest need doing. This will be my big job of tomorrow, it will easily take a full day.
Today began with an email abut the next Fall in Green gig, an event for Macclesfield Book Festival, which is four February weekends of events in Christ Church. We'll perform for 20 mins or so on the 2nd February. I updated the FIG website with prettier Song-Kick graphics, and prepared the paperwork for the event. After that I charged into a major Argus update and have worked all day on it. Argus v1.51 is now live with four changes:
First, the ability to save modulators in other bit depths. This is useful as Floating Point files are non-lossy compared to 16-bit dithered ones.
Second, added the ability to activate/solo/mute tracks by colour group, as well as generally organising these options.
Third, improving the optimisation of events at the same time index. Several events at the same time can be now automatically merged...
...and finally, which I'm most proud of, a new transformation process for Transformed objects. Before this (and in ALL Hector games until today), the position*size was added to each vertex, but this has the effect of scaling down things to the screen centre. I've never really used 'size' for transformed objects until Argus, but here is is useful for things like decals, logos, subtitles, and other things which should appear on the screen directly without being affected by the camera. The new processing scales the object first, then set the position. Sounds simple enough, but it's been at least 15 years (perhaps 20) since I did any Vertex Shader coding, so it was a re-learning curve.
The next (future) update will concern the screen size and dynamic calculation of things like number of tracks. That's a complex job too. I want to incorporate some form of zoom-out view in future. I need to update the manual too, and add multiple languages.
Tomorrow, those Steam graphics. Yesterday evening, Deb heard the new Fall in Green album for the first time. The artwork for that is making slow progress (when I can find time). We'll have to dress up for band photos this weekend. On Saturday we're off to Chester to deliver my Sleep painting to the musesum.
Onwards we charge.
