More version 1.0 news

Version 1.0 Checklist - Current Status

30 fully-working games (including Mines) - Check
Perfect display of the games - Check
Loading of built-in game presets (Easy, Medium, Hard etc.) - Check
Presets menu can cope with any number of presets - Check
Saving your own custom preset for each game, with automatic loading of the preset for that game ("I like net to start on a 10x10" mode) - Check
Ability to bypass the above if you want when starting a game - Check
Blackbox fix (so you can enter, e.g. 4-10 balls instead of a fixed number) - Check
Map fix (so you can see which "countries" were given to you at the start and are therefore locked) - Check
Loopy fix (so that you can still use the "old" presets which are much more playable than the enormous presets in the new code) - Check
Up to ten save slots can be loaded, saved and safely deleted from within the game - Check
Auto-save option so that whenever you quit a puzzle it is saved in a special slot and the same puzzle in the same state greets you next time you run that game - Check
Ability to bypass the above if you want when starting a game - Check
Cursor-key emulation available for certain games (sokoban etc.)
Latest SVN (including a more complex version of Loopy) - Check
Background Music - Check
Volume control - Check
Track list (up to ten music tracks, only turn on the ones you want to play, if any) - Check
Music can be replaced by any OGG file - check
Tweaked floating-point (decimal numbers) support in some games configuration options - Check
Screenshot feature on stick click (with options to snap whole screen or just puzzle area and settings in a global settings menu to hide certain elements) - Check
Game menu can cope with any number of games - Check

Hourglass cursors, credits screens, SVN version number in the title screen, updated text throughout, general help for keys, nicer menu system, smaller executable, smaller distribution (you can even remove the music, which doesn't need to be there), and a million and one tiny tweaks - Check

Basically the only things that remain on my list for v1.0 are "Interruptible generation", a new verson of malloc() and some random code-style, duplicated variables etc. that I can prune but which don't affect the games at all.

Interruptible generation for the games which are "slow" by default (which seems to be Filling and Slide) shouldn't be too hard at all. Moving it to every game will take a bit longer as they all have different generation strategies and it'll take a while to understand the code and find the bottlenecks.

It's also a little tricky to "recover" from a interrupted generation cleanly, but it shouldn't happen too often, so that shouldn't be an issue. Mainly, it's where the game allocated a ton of memory to generate the puzzle and I missed that it should be cleaned up.

The new "malloc" (which allocates memory for the games to use) may well be implemented for v1.0 depending on how easy it is to do. The games already use a "safe malloc" within the puzzle collection for all memory allocations, which leaves the opportunity to extend it to be able to use some of the Video RAM on the GP2X too. Basically, when a "normal" memory allocation fails, it'll be able to carry on and provide a bit of Video RAM to use instead and the games won't even know the difference.

The whole procedure would be transparent to the games, but provide them with up to 32Mb of RAM extra if they need it. I can't see many current games needing it will provide a safety barrier should they touch on the 32Mb mark. I'm looking at a new game (which probably will come after v1.0 if at all) that might well come close to that mark on it's larger settings. Once you add multiple fonts, PNG's loaded into RAM, OGG files, etc. it's better to be safe for the sake of fifty lines of code.

Anyway, version 1.0 is iminent and in a more-than-releaseable state as it is. I just want to playtest some more (the wife is very good at finding bugs accidentally), get those two more bits of code in and then it'll be released.