Ok, it's been two weeks. What's happened?

Well, the laptop's breathing again but it's not too reliable for doing any work on, so I've gone ahead and got that Mac. And now that's where my current focus lies. See, the system I'm using to create the game, BlitzMax, allows you to compile the same code on a Mac, a PC and on Linux with minimal changes.

In theory.

Unfortunately, things haven't gone smoothly. For a start, my editor won't work at all on the Mac thanks to a painfully slow implementation of listboxes, so any further work on that will have to stick to the PC for the time being.

Elsewhere, the GUI system I've planned on using has been throwing up dodgy frame rates on the Mac as well, the bottleneck being reading from the keyboard. While I can get by fine knowing that my editor will only work on Windows, the game must run as smoothly as possible on every platform.

I got a Mac because if I can release games for both platforms, I'll theoretically improve sales. I'd only need to sell 80 or so Mac copies to have it pay for itself. So it's very important that I get everything running smoothly.

Thankfully, it's entirely possible to code without having to test every 5 minutes. The Mac's in the spare room, a quiet haven where I can work without being distracted. As a result I can still churn out code and then give it a few tests on the PC just to make it perfect.

Also, seeing as I need to learn more about Macs and all that, I'm going to have to write a little something extra, specially for OS X. I'll worry about a PC version when its finished.

It's dead

Or as good as.

Not the game. My laptop. The hard drive is effectively fucked, quite possibly thanks to the overheating I had earlier. A new hard drive would cost about £50 but for a four year old laptop that's having more problems than I am (and that's a lot of problems), I'm not convinced it's a good idea to keep hacking at it.

Instead, I'm going to buy myself a Mac. Plenty of advantages to be had with that.

What it does mean is that I can't get much work done over the next few days, though weekends are still pretty clear. I'll use this time to finish some of those games other people made.

It nearly happened again

Damn right it nearly did. I had just sat down to work on how seeding systems are set up in the database, when I started to lose confidence in how I had previously done it and was all set to rework that.

Fuck it. Rework it? Nah. I took an hour or two out and came to the conclusion that it does the job and is very simple, so I'll keep it like that. If I want to rework it at any point, I'll wait until I actually have a game and can then fritter away time on such unproductive tasks.

Elsewhere, with the spare room in the flat having been tidied up in the last week, I've decided to get myself a desk and stop working in the living room so much, distracted by the internet, the telly, the fridge full of food and so on. I'll try to instill a proper work ethic rather than the current slapdash approach. Anything to make progress.

An African or a European Vole?

I'm well aware that it's been a week and a half, and there's a very good explanation around here somewhere. I'm going to need three parakeets and a small African vole to find them though.

Are there any voles in Africa?

Anyway, I'm really pissed off these days because I'm still stuck on the editor, which of course I had already finished. But the end is in sight, I guess.

In the meantime I've been biding my time with games of Football Manager 2006, and actually enjoying it again. Makes a change.