Ping - 2025.08 - Slow and Steady
February is nearing its end and it's time once again to look back at what has been done and what is to be done.
No releases so far, but the progress is steady (albeit slow):
- Plainstead version of A Dragon and the Tower has some critical fixes and can be downloaded here; Expect a usable package released in March; For now it will be a separate package; We'll check later if we can unify this build with the main one;
- A Dragon and the Tower 1.1 is progressing:
- We have a fully working build of INSTEAD for Windows 98 and Pentium 2 CPU; Going further is much harder because I have to rebuild all of the dependencies, but I am going to at least try, to see if it's worth it (performance mainly)
- The game itself is currently loading a lot of stuff into memory at times, requiring up to 60+ megabytes of RAM; Even if we decide to limit our support to Pentium 2 it may still be a little bit too much; We'll see if we can optimise that without imparing the experience too much;
- Prologue for the next game is being implemented; Most likely we will be able to switch to the first chapter in March already;
- Streams are progressing steadily with 2 times a week; We still have a lot to play in the repo; I'm starting to think about making a small page on this website with basic info about each game and a link to the walkthrough;
- I have started a limited redesign of silverwing.one; The goal is to ensure better support of lightweight and older browsers; I don't work on this intensively, so don't wait for this too soon (still, let me know if the site is displayed poorly in your browser of choice, and I'll see what can be done);
- Sadly, not every browser is like Internet Explorer and most of them have no way to provide unique markup overrides, so I will have to resort to javascript for this purpose; This leads to four levels of styling:
- Baseline (no CSS)
- Safe CSS (Will not require Javascript; Styles that are safe to use in any browser; Most likely will be limited to font sizes)
- Minimal CSS (Will require Javascript; Will be enabled for older browsers with proper CSS support; Visuals will be simplified -- no rounded corners, programmatic gradients etc.)
- Full CSS (Will require Javascript; Will be enabled for browsers supporting CSS3 or later; The site will look roughly as you see now)
- Thus the plans for the March are:
- Release A Dragon and the Tower 1.1 + INSTEAD-9x builds;
- Check if i486 builds provide sufficient performance on at least late Pentium MMX machines;
- Check if game can be optimised to use up less RAM in peak;
- Publish some INSTEAD-9x builds;
- Release A Dragon and the Tower installer for Windows 9x-2000;
- Release A Dragon and the Tower package for Plainstead;
- Finish the prologue for the next game;
- Continue working on website redesign;
- Continue streaming; Maybe make a page with short games info;
- If any time is left -- it's time to start working on the engine;
- Work on the engine will most likely lead to a number of articles supported by prototype implementations and parts of specification;
Thank you for your attention! Until we meet again!