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Author Topic: SITREP Saturday #2: Cloudy with a Chance of Saves  (Read 1547 times)

Kyzrati

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SITREP Saturday #2: Cloudy with a Chance of Saves
« on: November 03, 2017, 07:02:42 PM »

A 100% chance! Cloud saves (and settings) are coming to Cogmind soonish.

I chose to go with Steam's "Autocloud," which doesn't require any code changes. Instead it's just some backend settings that specify which files to migrate between machines. The cloud itself was really easy to set up.

Testing a cloud-enable version of Cogmind:


Using the Steam console to ensure the proper files are being synced:


After which I started up the game on my old laptop to make sure it resumes where it was with all the same options... Yes! I was actually worried at first that this would be a process full of headaches because I followed the (simple) instructions and... it failed to notice any files to sync :/. Then I just tried again and it worked fine. So yeah, um, I guess it works.

The whole process only took a couple hours, but I'll test it some more to make sure it'll be stable. In any case, Cogmind also keeps multiple backups of your /user/ files for emergency recovery purposes, so nothing to worry about :D

When the time comes, you'll want to update to Beta 3.1 first, and also be sure to start playing on the system that has the original files! (Don't worry, I'll remind you in the patch notes.)

Although Steam Cloud is simply a setting I can flip on now, I won't be enabling it until the next update because there was another much more involved change required for proper cloud support: adjustments to the config file. I already talked about that bit last week, but that requirement means I'll need to push an update before activating the cloud. (In the meantime, I also finally added to the manual a description of what each advanced.cfg setting does, since their names can only hold so much information.)

Features

In terms of Cogmind itself I've just been handling some little bug reports, with a lot of other stuff piling up on the near-term TODO list since I'm still too busy to deal with it.

As it turns out, Cogmind's default hardware cursor doesn't work on one particular player's 2160p setup, so I added support for custom "software" cursors, which basically means it's now possible to wrest control of the cursor's appearance from the OS and make it look like anything :)

Custom cursors can be made to different shapes, colors, or even sizes in case you enjoy crushing tiles:


It's as easy as drawing a little .png and dropping it in the right directory.

This scary guy was helping me debug the new system...

...but I had to destroy him in the end.

BUGS!

When you use a custom software cursor on top of a display system relying on dirty rectangles, the cursor has to save what's behind it as it enters a new position, and redraw the background when it moves again.

Otherwise it just becomes a big mess :P


Yesterday I slipped in one of the recent features requests... probably not hard to spot which one :)

Log messages can now come with turn numbers! This is the default in Tactical HUD mode, though new advanced options can be used to turn them off if you don't want them.

Another example:


This has been on my TODO list for a very long time, but the "best" implementation I was planning would take a while (and no one had been requesting it in recent years), so I kept deprioritizing this one. Then another request came this week and I decided fine, I'll just do it the easy way so it's at least in there as an option! I like how the extra numbers make it appear nice and computery, too :)

Videos

This week I finally got to stream again! Thanks to everyone who showed up, it was a lot of fun (especially once I actually got OBS to recognize my mic again xD).

I haven't played much over the past several months, and got a little overconfident and died after about an hour, but then started a new run and at least made it to the late-game before, again, dying :P. I make a lot of different decisions while streaming than I normally would (I won the run I did before streaming, really!), but it's all fun so no matter :D

There are still a number of others recording Cogmind content, too, including newcomer LuckyLuckLuc who is getting good fast and just recently streamed his first win. Shobalk is continuing his intro video series.

Since a lot of the relevant SITREP discussion happens on Steam rather than in the forums, for reference here's a link to this same news on Steam.
« Last Edit: December 15, 2017, 07:14:19 AM by Kyzrati »
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