No progress

An October 31st release isn't happening for Vampire Castle - predominately a new job, birthdays and less free time in the day due to train travel means this project has had no new work on in the last two weeks.

Random Developments

A couple of things to mention that don't really warrant their own posts.

Today I got bored of Vampire Castle and took a short break to do some poor box art for the game. The game itself is coming along nicely, as per last post, in addition the game trail is now working and the reels spinning randomly - I'll later amend it so that it runs on a weighted probability e.g. "70% payout".

I also learnt about the "heart beat" function in Windows Vista that may be unnecessarily keeping your hard drive active when it could be idle and turning off/saving notebook battery. Have a look at this Microsoft forum for more info. I've set the value to zero as per the instructions to disable the registry setting and according to Task Manger -> Performance -> Resource Monitor -> Disk Vista is no longer writing a "lastalive" file every few seconds to the hard drive. Whether this will help battery life on a Vista notebook I don't know, but there's been no adverse affects so far.

Vampire Castle Video Update

I've made significant progress on my first Nintendo DS game "The Fruit Machine - Vampire Castle" but I'm disappointed that an audio recording I had of a genuine chav/wine-o hassling me whilst I recorded sound effects for the game has been accidentally deleted and the player I had the recording on has since broke (don't trust Aldi/Tevion - 3 of these players broke for me with software freezes). Useless Fascin8 support who are the warranty providers for ALDI for this product told me because it was out of warranty now I couldn't have another. This is highly disputable by UK law (a good has to be free of defects, fit for purpose and I need to have "enjoy quiet possession of the goods" - which clearly three returns shows I have not). So rather than return the player again for another breakable one I'll simply warn others and not buy more ALDI high tech goods.

Anyway rant over - enjoy the video

Aerofoil 1.4.5 "Bug" and (simple) "Solution"

A few users have been commenting that they have been starting Aerofoil and the settings they have selected in the installer have not been picked up.

This appears to be a "user error".

On install, the installer puts your chosen configuration settings in the program group and startup folder shortcuts for Aerofoil..

Unfortunately the majority of affected users (3 I know of to date) have been starting the Aerofoil.exe in C:\Program Files\Aerofoil instead of with these shortcuts, which of course does not have the chosen settings and starts with everything enabled.

For users who want to run the application manually, please use the shortcut in the "All Programs -> Aerofoil" program group. If you no longer have Aerofoil shortcut icons simply running the installer again will create them (and allow you to reconfigure Aerofoil).

If you are using the shortcuts and still have problems please drop a comment below and an obfuscated email address I can get in contact with you on. Please also verify you are using Aerofoil 1.4.5 by viewing the about box before contacting me (remember if you are updating Aerofoil that you need to exit it before running the new installer).

Thanks,

Benjamin

Vampire Castle Update

I've spent the entire weekend designing and writing the model behind the "The Fruit Machine", the first instalment is "Vampire Castle". I haven't yet decided whether there will be other machines, however the code is entirely a -well designed- *1* tier event driven "Fruit Machine" model. Simply put, the design mirrors an "abstract" fruit machine, with abstract boards, abstract components, etc etc, and so has a clear defined structure, allowing for multiple differing implementations, i.e. fruit machines to "sit on top". The domain logic (the features) are tightly integrated into the implementation because I need to keep memory overhead low and the logic is highly specific to the implementation, i.e. the Vampire Castle machine.

Although my time is mostly limited to weekends I would estimate a release within the next month.

Aerofoil 1.4.5 and LocateMe 1.0.1 Beta

Aerofoil 1.4.5

- Fixes a small issue with hibernate closing explorer on resume

Download Aerofoil 1.4.5 installer
Download Aerofoil 1.4.5 source

LocateMe 1.0.1 Beta (source only release)

- Basic integrated GPS support (no need for a bluetooth GPS - Satellite View not yet working)
- Refactor of view handling

Download LocateMe 1.0.1 Beta source

Many thanks to Stefan Lembach for providing N95 testing, and Calum for providing an integrated GPS reader class