Time flies by, and so the last posting is already collecting dust. As usual I’m not getting much time to work on “Phase 2”, but I’m making steady (though little) progress on an (almost daily) base. So the new user interface I’ve been talking about in my last posting is in (with a few minor things to be done and sorted) and it looks stunning, adding a lot to the game, both in terms of visual style and usability. And I’m also stitching all the parts together (again) so that I may be able to release a working (up until recently you couldn’t even really play a whole game without crashing and such) within the next few months. I’ll have to admit though that it took me longer to implement it as projected, but every time I see it I know all the additional work was worth every minute spend on it, and I hope that this translates to players of “Phase 2” too.
And where light is shed, there’s also usually darkness as well, and this time it’s Turbo Delphi. I guess I should’ve never switched over from Delphi 7, but the bigger the game gets the more problems Turbo Delphi has coping up. The IDE is running out of memory at least twice a day (it starts out with roughly 60 MBytes of memory and then goes crazy up until 1.4 GBytes of memory are used by it). I installed all hotfixes and DelphiSpeedUp and “Phase 2” is not causing any memory leaks, so I guess it’s the fact that Turbo Delphi was never meant to be used for bigger projects. And yes, I also tried switching to Lazarus and FPC but dropped the idea. I like FPC (with all their advanced stuff that’s been promised for the Delphi compiler ages ago and never came), but I never liked lazarus, so I don’t see the game going this route anytime soon, so I guess I’ll have to stick with Turbo Delphi until “Phase 2” is finished.
So stay tuned, I’ll also have a new work-in-progress video up soon that’ll show the new GUI in all it’s glory.