Saturday 25 February 2017

Leadlight Gamma news and CYOA extension news

Doing maintenance rounds on my websites, I noticed that the Leadlight Gamma homepage was out of date and displaying incorrect info I'd forgotten was there. I've fixed this, and updated the game's sites in general.

  • There was an old warning on the site about problems you might face getting the game onto your iOS device. That warning was temporary and is now irrelevant and gone. iFrotz downloads the game just fine.
  • There was a lack of warning on the site about trying to play the game on a Mac running macOS Sierra. There is now a warning, because the game doesn't work in Sierra. There are fatal problems with both Glulx interpreter options. Gargoyle broke in Sierra and the unofficial patched version hangs when booting Leadlight Gamma, probably because of the graphics. Lectrote gets stuck on two of the game's graphic features, the image gallery and the full screen map. I could potentially say, "Don't look at the gallery or the full screen map and it won't hang," but if I then also have to say, "Plus there's no audio in this version," it feels obviously to me like I just shouldn't be selling something with so many shortcomings to the Sierra user.

The Sierra issues are vaguely depressing given that the game was brand new just two years ago, but interpreter maintenance is beyond my power.

My personal focus will be moving to my music-making for the next period of time, so my IF projects (the CYOA extension for Inform and the actress game) will mostly be going on the backburner for the same period of time.

In January this year I started to build out standalone versions of the demos from my CYOA extension, including the Ryan Veeder-endorsed spinoff Captain Piedaterre's Blunders, but doing so revealed to me there were still important fixes that needed to be made to the fundamental extension code. So it was a useful exercise for me, but obviously one with a less fun result than it could have had. Mostly I hope that the extension doesn't slide into the pits of technical incompatibility or obsolescence before I can I revisit it.