Spoonbill Software News

December 2007

Hi everyone! Christmas is almost here again and so programming is winding down for another year. As the weather gets warmer and the days get longer (it is coming up for summer in Oz) I tend to do less programming and more out doors things. But since this is the first newsletter since August, let’s see what’s been happening.

Official website address

I finally bit the bullet and paid the cash so that I now have a proper website address for Spoonbill Software. Instead of the old http://www.omninet.net.au/~irhumph (which you can still use if you want to), the new address is http://www.spoonbillsoftware.com.au - a little bit easier to remember. You can also contact me by email at ian@spoonbillsoftware.com.au and request games using games@spoonbillsoftware.com.au

Release of new games

Since August, two new games have been released. BG Uno 1.0 – the latest in my Blind Gamers series for vision impaired and blind players, and Hex-It! 1.0 which adds another dimension to Brick Shooter, with its hexagonal board and tiles.

BG Uno bug

Several players of BG Uno have come up with a bug which took a little while to pin down. It only happened when the human player had two cards left and he played a Skip card. The next player in sequence was not skipped and got a chance to play! This has now been fixed in BG Uno 1.1 which was released on November 18^th.

Hex-It! rewrite

One of my testers came up with a new twist for Hex-It! and also an idea to optionally highlight the potential paths of launched tiles. I tried to incorporate this into the existing game, but the way which I had programmed it made it very “clunky” and not very responsive. So I completely rewrote it using Direct-X instead of the native Delphi images and this made the whole thing smoother and much more responsive. In the process I also perfected the detection of which hexagon the mouse pointer is over. In version 1.0 this is only approximate and in some instances, unless the mouse pointer is somewhere near the center of a tile, the graphics show the pointer in one hexagon but the detection routine thinks it is in the adjacent hexagon. I finally resolved this problem and the routine now works flawlessly. The new twist is an additional option called Bypass Tiles. If this option is ON, when you play a tile, it is not stopped by the protruding corners of a tile already on the board, but only if the launched tile hits the tile full-on. This provides a game which uses completely different tactics. Another option, Highlight Path is useful as a guide to where a playable tile will end up if played. With Highlight Path ON, as you pass the mouse pointer over playable tiles in the tile pool, not only do you get an L and an R which tells you which mouse button to press, but the path which will be taken by the played tile is highlighted. The highlighting ceases at the tile on the board which will stop the launched tile. Even if this option is OFF, you can activate it temporarily by holding down the SHIFT key while moving the mouse. Another new option is Backtrack Highlight. When this is ON, when you pass the mouse pointer over a tile which is already on the board, clear paths back to the tile pools are highlighted. This enables you to quickly find a tile of the correct color required to make a group. Again, if this option is OFF, you can activate it temporarily by holding down the SHIFT key while moving the mouse. All in all, this new version a great improvement on the original. It is due for release in the New Year.

Spoonbill Software is voted Number 9 of the TOP 25 WEB SITES FOR GAMERS WHO ARE BLIND. October 2007

Here is the text of the email from 7-128 Software who conducted the survey.

To Ian Humphreys, Spoonbill Software

Mr. Humphreys, congratulations!

7-128 Software is pleased to inform you that your site has been selected as one of our list of the TOP 25 WEB SITES FOR GAMERS WHO ARE BLIND. Consistent with our mission to make computer games accessible to all casual game enthusiasts, our Marketing department has done an extensive search of sites containing information relevant to the blind gaming community. Your site is number 9 on our list.

We toured well over 100 sites, and have created our list based on quality of games or information offered, longevity and reach of the site, and accessibility. We think your games are of great value to the blind gaming community.

We are offering the list to a number of organizations and institutions serving the blind community. The list is detailed on our Web site at: www.7128.com.

Sincerely,

Cynthia Geller, VP Sales and Marketing, LLC, www.7128.com

Reporting problems and program bugs

When you report a problem or a program bug, until we get your problem sorted, please can I request that all future responses to this email be appended by using the Reply button. This ensures that all correspondence regarding your problem remains in the one email. This helps me by encapsulating all correspondence in the one place and prevents me from having to search previous emails to refer back to something. Hopefully this should speed up the resolution of your problem. Thanks.

Keeping you up-to-date

When I contact you to inform you of an upgrade or a new game release I send a bulk email to sometimes several hundred people. I always get some emails returned undelivered and this can be caused by several things.

(1) You have changed your email address without informing me of the new one.

(2) Your email account is over quota. You haven’t cleared out your old emails and have filled up your mailbox.

(3) Your email server is down at the time I sent the email.

(4) Your free email account, hotmail, yahoo etc. has lapsed through lack of use.

In any of these cases I cannot inform you of the upgrade or new release and you will be left out of the loop.

Please let me also thank the many people who do let me know when they change their email address. These are the ones who can be kept fully informed when upgrades and new games are released.

A Blast From The Past – No. 1

This is the first in a series of reminiscences from the early days of computers.

Back in the days when mainframe computers took up a whole room and punch cards were the means of input to the computer and personal computers were unheard of (I’m talking about the early 1970s) I was programming for the Department of Lands and Surveys and we’d written a program called CADMAPS which produced graphical plots of mapping survey data. All our programs were written by hand onto Coding Sheets and converted into 80-column punch cards by a keypunch operator, one card for each line of the program. All our survey and mapping programs in those days were written in FORTRAN IV. The CADMAPS program took up a complete box of 2000 punch cards and every time we wanted to re-compile the program, we had to get the changes punched into cards and inserted into the correct places in the card deck. Each card had printed along its top edge, a human understandable version of what was punched into the card. Then, because we didn’t have our own mainframe computer and were using the one in the Physics building down at the University of Western Australia, we had to drive about 12 kilometers down to the Uni and submit the card deck for processing. A set of control cards on the front of the deck instructed the computer to compile the program into an executable form and catalog it on the hard disk. After the compilation, we got the cards back, and a line printer listing of the program, subroutine by subroutine, with a cross-reference map for each subroutine. If there were any errors, we had to lug the box of cards back to the office, locate and fix the errors, get the appropriate cards re-punched and repeat the whole process again. I used to make this trip twice a day not only with our programs to compile and debug, but also with users’ data cards to be processed by production programs such as the Cadastral Traverse program and the program which converted rectangular coordinates to geographical coordinates. The Uni computer was on the first floor, accessed by a flight of external steps and one day I was coming down the steps with the morning’s output and our box of 2000 punch cards for the CADMAPS program, and loaded up with line printer listings and I stumbled, and dropped the box of cards and they went tumbling down the steps and spilled out all over the place! Luckily it wasn’t windy or most of them would have blown away and have been impossible to retrieve. I was aghast! I quickly made it down to the ground and began collecting the cards and putting them back into the box. Needless to say they were in complete mess but at least I managed to retrieve all of them. When I got them back to the office I related what had happened and one of my colleagues offered to help me get the card deck back into the correct order. Unfortunately the cards did not contain sequence numbers which would have made the job a lot easier, and the only clue to the correct order of the cards was the line printer listing of the compilation. It took us the rest of that day and all of the next day to get the deck back into the correct order and then of course we had to recompile it again to make sure that it still worked! Things have become a lot easier now that the programs are stored electronically!

Wishing you a happy festive season

Ian Humphreys

Spoonbill Software

Albany, Western Australia.