Ethan

Some simple touches really go a long way. For instance: bad sound effects are much much better than no sound effects. The same way, you can add a lot of character to a game by having title screens fade in and out. So I took a few minutes today and added some fades to various parts of the game. Not all of them -- the main game is going to be tough, and I think there are a few that still need fade-outs when a key interrupts them (OpenView, MetaView). Still, it helps.

Also, I may have fixed Carl's weird slowness bug. He hasn't said that it worked but he hasn't said that it didn't work either, and I'm taking that to be positive. I fixed a weird bug in level5 where a dialog wasn't getting placed in the right place -- this was caused by the fact that meanwhile events recently became meanwhile patterns, and patterns don't play when physics is shut off (by "cinematic" command). Pretty weird combination but I think the patterns-don't-play behavior is wrong, so I changed it. Level5 is really the only level that uses the "cinematic" command so far, so I know it didn't break anything. I often wonder if weird bugs like this would crop up less if I had a better design, but I don't know how to test it without rewriting everything..

Lastly, I started work on the station's "two-thickness walls" nonsense. It's gonna take some work, but I just spent twenty or thirty minutes discovering one approach that didn't work.

I'm sorry I've been so quiet lately! Some days, you lose track of progress reports because there's so much else to do.