Monthly Archives: September 2014

Metapost, Sprite Lamp

Steam release, new website, and forums

So! The big news, I suppose, is that Sprite Lamp is out there! In the wild. What’s unusual is how late I am to post about this, but main point is, Sprite Lamp for Windows is on Steam right at this very moment.

The reason I haven’t posted about this yet, despite the Steam release being last Thursday, is that I was hoping to get Sprite Lamp out in its DRM-free form at the same time. I’ll be doing this via the Humble Widget, and I suspect rather strongly that a lot of people would rather own a tool like Sprite Lamp in a more traditional way, rather than having to boot up Steam in order to use it. For that reason, I’ve been holding off on talking much about the release. In other words, I don’t consider it really released until the DRM-free version is out there. The issue is that because I want it to be possible to upgrade from the Hobbyist to the Pro versions of Sprite Lamp, the good people at Humble tell me it takes a bit longer to set up the widget, and that I’ll have it early this week. Big announcement when that happens, of course.

Regarding the new website, this is for a couple of reasons. The old website made use of wordpress.com, largely because I set it up way back before I knew where Snake Hill Games was going, and wanted something easy to deal with. Gradually, there have been more and more things that I wanted to be able to do that I couldn’t via wordpress.com, but it has come to a head by learning that I couldn’t use iframes and thus couldn’t embed the Humble Widget. This isn’t the first thing I’ve been wanting but unable to do with the website, but it’s the first that is an unambiguous show-stopper, so the switch had to be made.

This has a few benefits. For instance, Snake Hill Games now has a forum! This has been a long time coming (shout out to my friends at Graphite Lab who helped me out with some initial forum attempts earlier – it was only because of my foot-dragging that that didn’t happen), but you can now come to the forums (link near the top of the sidebar on the left) and say hello. I’m not overly familiar with the running of forums, and I’m not expecting them to explode into a huge bustling community or anything, but if you have problems or suggestions or want to show off your artwork, head on over – I apologise in advance if I screw up the administrative side of things.

Low-content rambling

Obscure Unity/Surface Pro 2 problem solved

Okay so this is a post that has little to do with Sprite Lamp. In fact, it’s probably not interesting to most people who have subscribed – sorry about that. It’s about an obscure problem I had today that I seem to have fixed, but couldn’t really find anything about it online. So I post it here, on the off chance that someone else has the problem and maybe googles their way to this page, and maybe can waste slightly less time on it than I did.

I’m using a Surface Pro 2 (the 256GB model, though I doubt that matters), and was going to do some work in Unity3D. I hadn’t run Unity for a little while, and when I fired it up today, it had some problems. Specifically, lots of messed up visual stuff. Unfortunately I didn’t get a screenshot, but to my eye it looked like some fairly low level VRAM corruption of some kind… within the Unity Editor, various things were messed up, including button and other UI graphics being busted, text was garbled and screwy, and various texture previews were busted. Interestingly, it seemed to also screw up some of the actual game assets when rendering in the viewport.

Anyway, I tried the usual raindances, restarted Unity, restarted Windows, etc. to no avail. My graphics drivers were up to date, so that seemed all good. However! Long story short, a couple of people have reported that using Intel’s generic drivers rather than the ones Microsoft provides with Windows Update can help with some gaming applications (plus it gives you a control panel to mess with certain options), and I had actually done this on my Surface some time ago – but, I had since reinstalled the OS and obliterated the changes. Also, Unity never used to have this problem… curious. So, I got myself over to Intel’s driver page, navigated to the HD4400 area, and got the drivers from there. And that seems to have fixed it! Happy Unity shader editing since then, and all is well in the world. So if, by chance, I’m not the only person to have ever had this issue, and one of the other poor souls happen to wander here in their confusion, there you go. It’s what worked for me, anyway.

Sprite Lamp

Sprite Lamp for Windows launching really soon

Hi folks!

So I guess I’ve kind of given away the main bit of this in the title. There’s a bit of a story behind it, but the TL;DR is that Sprite Lamp for Windows will be launching on Steam on the 25th of this month! Yes, that’s in a few days – this Thursday in fact. I’ve got an application pending for a Humble Widget too, so while I can’t 100% confirm it, I’m hoping that it will be available via Humble Widget (at www.spritelamp.com) on the same day, or at least soon after.

There’s a bit of a story leading up to this which I’m going to tell now – not because it’s particularly interesting, but just for the benefit of people who like to stay informed about adventures in development.

Recent events

My initial plan was to launch a bit earlier, on the sixteenth. I just had a couple of things to do, and one of them was to ask the fine folks at Valve how to tag it as ‘early access’. This would have been on something like the ninth of this month. What I learned when they replied is that Steam’s Early Access feature is for games, not software in general, and as such Sprite Lamp can’t make use of it. Sprite Lamp is in a pretty good state now I think, but there were definitely some bugs still there and I was also hoping for some wider feedback on the UI and general usability issues, so this was bit of a rude shock (NB This was my fault, not Valve’s). I briefly considered delaying, but on further reflection I concluded that:

  1. The serious bugs that remained were probably fixable in a week or so of furious coding.
  2. Though the software will continue to improve in the future, it’s at a point now that people will find it useful for their development, and by delaying it I’d just be keeping it out of people’s hands unnecessarily.
  3. I’m inclined to be pretty nervous about launching products and that’s probably making me cringe away from this situation a bit, but I should correct for that personal bias of mine and just get on with it.

So, steeling myself to a week of reasonably full-on bug fixing and polishing, I got into it! At least, I wish that’s what had happened. What actually happened was that my computer died. Totally random, by all appearances, but not ideal timing. No data loss, but certain set things back a bit. I was back up and running in a few days, delayed the launch by a small amount, and got to work. Fortunately, I was right about being able to get through the bugs on my list in a few days, and that brings us to where we are now. Despite a slightly hair-raising last couple of weeks, Sprite Lamp on Windows/Steam is ready to go!

MacOS and Linux versions

So, I mentioned in my last post that I was going to stagger the launch, because it’s a small team and I’m not familiar enough with MacOS and Linux development, and in general, it’s scary enough launching a product on Steam without throwing in multiple OSes at the same time. However, I’m pleased to announce that the MacOS build is making really good progress. I’ve had my head in Steam stuff for a little while now, but the MacOS port has made enough progress in my absence that it’s time for me to get back into that side of things (that is, it’s reached a point where my knowledge of Sprite Lamp’s codebase will speed things up greatly). Though I’m reluctant to make solid announcements, I’m pretty confident that we’ll have at least something beta-ish in a few weeks, and I’m hoping for the proper launch within a month of the Windows launch.

The Linux build of Sprite Lamp has historically been way ahead of the MacOS build, but I’m afraid that will change at this point. However, it’s definitely going to be following the MacOS build pretty shortly.