Well, it has been a while. Some of the prescribed medication seems to have been interfering with my ability To Get Stuff Done(tm). That said, either I’m getting used to that, or this is a bit of an anomalous bump. Let’s hope for the former.
This week was mostly bug-fixes, though there is also a mystery.
On the bug-fix side, the auto-advance feature needed a little work. While it was (theoretically) suspended during (eg) visits to the options screen, you could still toggle it on and off in those places, and that just wasn’t correct or intuitive.
Likewise, using fast-forward should clear auto-advance, and didn’t properly.
Lesson: Every feature has to be checked against other features. This is one form of integration testing, and you should not neglect it. The more features you have, the more possibilities of degenerate interactions. Not unlike prescription medication.
Additionally, the laptop showed me that some of my positional calculations for choice-buttons were substandard on smaller screens. I’d added a little header-widget when choices were presented, and it interacted badly with the other math.
Go see the above lesson a second time!
Mystery Time!
Okay, so I went to Bar SK on Saturday for Get That Game Done Returns!
Aside from being generically great, it was also pretty damn nifty to show off some of my game and tech to people who seemed genuinely excited to see it.
There’s a photo above of me getting some bug-fixing done at the bar after the event.
However, I had one of those “Watch this!” moments.
I talked about how hard I was working on accessibility (particularly for those with low- or no-vision), and toggled on the text-to-speech function.
At which point the game crashes dead somwhere down in the bowels of Microsoft’s TTS dlls.
Embarrassing.
When I got home, I was able to verify that it still works just fine on my dev box at home, and it used to work just fine on the laptop. It just doesn’t work on the laptop right now.
It is a mystery, and A Bad Thing(tm).
Does the Windows Assistive voice need to be specifically configured somehow, before I can throw to it? That’s never been an issue before, but last time I checked was before the Creator’s Update.
Is there something else wrong? TTS takes place in a separate thread so that it doesn’t hold-up gameplay and display-processing. Could I have a race on string deallocation that doesn’t show up on faster hardware?
This needs to be investigated.
Hopefully, there will be another dev update this time next week. I’m really hoping so.