Welcome to the Silverwing's Lair

Seemingly every time after an active month there is a month of decline. Project status:

• A Dragon and the Tower -- 1.1 is still being worked on; Expected updates:
  • Lowered system requirements: Official support of Windows 95 or newer, Pentium 2 CPUs; Unofficially -- i486-compatible CPU is required; You'll need something fast enough to paint 640x480 in 32-bit color; There's no way around that; Further optimisations are not planned;
  • Esperanto translation by arbtttrn6;
  • Unification with plainstead version;
• Don't Follow the Butterfly -- still struggling with prologue; No major news;
• "The Engine" (will be named when there is some code) -- some tests were run; some expectations set; still a lot of preliminary work before writing any real code;
  • Requirements are going to be higher than previously thought if you want steady 60 FPS in 32 bit color;
  • Portability stays a priority, but we may include some optimised algorithms in C code to ensure high enough performance on target platforms;
  • Need to evaluate capabilities of various versions of directdraw and opengl for rendering; as well as software rendering performance;
  • SDl1-2 is the platform of choice for initial implementation; Highly optimised and very portable; See no reason in using SDL3 -- it's not bringing any advantages over SDL2 for newer platforms and brings requirements even higher;
  • Considering alternatives to Lua as a runtime -- just checking if there's something as portable, yet faster (something with JIT or even AOT compilation would be nice, but most of such stuff is restricted to certain OSes and versions);
• Other
  • Apple 2 GS build complete -- All of the planned upgrades installed, having a neat retro-gaming machine. Can finally enjoy Nox Archaist on real hardware;
  • Amiga 1200 -- A lot of pain with this one. Starting with machine not arriving in usable condition, continuing with me making a lot of mistakes during ordering upgrades and thus having now a semi-working and pretty uncomfortable to use machine;
  • Gaming
    • Ultima 6 completed -- the game changed drastically when compared to U5. New engine opened new capabilities, but at the same time the game was simplified and streamlined. No more first-person dungeons; No more separate buttons for every action (until you get used to that, you don't get how much more immersive that is compared to "U for use" approach); The world got a lot smaller; Maybe I should write a review?
    • TES: Arena started -- mage is a tough class to play at the beginning: very low hitpoints and not high enough mana (started with int about 60) made the first days in game really painful; After some leveling and grinding for gold though, playing became much more pleasant; The game is really technically impressive -- vast cities and wilderness locations, beautiful day and night cycle, weather effects, and even seasons, all in glorious first person perspective in magnificent VGA; Gameplay is simplistic though -- there is little more to do than some fetch quests and dungeon looting; Story dungeons are quite large, but I have only completed one yet, so still a lot to see;

Thank you for your attention! Until we meet again!