Good news! Well, it could actually be considered as bad news, but I choose to view it as good news! I've found a lot of "little" bugs in ZD. So, what can be good about that? Well, first of all; I'm glad I found them, because these are things that hinder gameplay, so, you know, it's only natural I would want to know about them. What's even better, though, is that I've already got rid of them! One of them was actually something I knew about and documented in the game's ReadMe. The other was a similar issue. I'm glad, in a way, that I'm finding many things day by day. It really warrants a new release on the Windows side of things. Things are going well!

In other news, spam emails have been pretty bad. I've taken more precautions such as never posting my email address in a regular name@domain.ext format. I think I've replaced all of them with a different format. I'm going to see if any of the email flow slows down. If not I may create a new email account to use and shut down the main one, hopefully so spammers will see it is invalid and maybe I'd be able to use it again. Spam is such a frustration!

It's been a little while between posts. I've finally got around to re-porting my code over to Windows. I had to update my version of Allegro, but after that everything worked fine without a problem. I'm glad to know all of the new stuff I added in; and changes to old funcitons works correctly in Windows.

I've been working on more levels lately, and I currently have three fully completed levels. My goal to shoot for is a level set consisting of 10 levels. The current levels I've created so far aren't of extreme difficulty, but they're enough to get the brain juices flowing.

Basically, the only thing holding off the 1.02 release of Zep's Dreamland is the new levels and a tiny bit of a bug that isn't really problematic or show stopping (it's just annoying to me). Hopefully I'll be able to kick out these new levels rather quickly, but we shall have to wait to see that. I'm still a little burnt out from writing the original 40 levels. :)

I finally reached a resolution with my forums. After having my hosting install certain required PERL libraries, etc, it was determined that my boards won't even run on the current server any longer; so now I must wait until they can move all of my data to a new server which will have a working perl and some other goodies that I don't have on this server. If the site seems to go down for a bit, that's why. As usual, I'll update once I notice that the transfer is complete. Hopefully the boards will work without much other debugging.

On another note; I did more porting today. To my surprise, today, I found out that fullscreen mode does not play nice using 16 bit mode in OS X. I had to write a few little fancy things to setup different default color depths for Windows and OS X. In either case, it fixed up some of those "obscurities" which were occoruing. It seems very much that most of them were attributed to switcing color depths on-the-fly, which would corrupt image data and (possibly) make the editor crash in certain circumstances. I'm glad that's all cleared up, now. I also added the functionality to change between fullscreen/windowed mode in the editor "on-the-fly." The editor also remembers what mode you were using since the previous run; so if you really enjoy a fullscreened editor, it will stay that way until you switch it and quit. I have yet to test all of these on the Windows side of the world, but I'm sure it will compile flawlessly.

As for levels, I have started to work on some new ones. I only have on in the works at the moment. It's almost complete. With a little more testing and additions of some eye-candy tiles, it should be all set. I remember all too well how much time it takes to make good, tough levels. :)

I'm so glad to finally have my website back and working normally, even if it is missing the forums. I am looking into those right now with my host. It seems that now that I've cleared up the directory structures and paths for the boards, now certain files are missing that should be on the host in the perl directory itself; so it's no longer my fault! We shall see what turns up. Again, like I said, if all else fails I'll just have to install new boards, maybe even different ones. I could turn the way of php for them if I can find database-less ones. Anyways, enough of that; onto the good stuff!

Maybe you haven't noticed (how couldn't you?), but there are finally some new screenshots up. These ones basically showcase the fact that Zep's Dreamland runs perfectly well in OSX. I've reached the point where I've eliminated all errors and warnings from the source code. There are still a few little obscurities I need to work out; such as getting a better grasp over some of the new (or newer) allegro functions I haven't been using at all. Also, the editor seems to be a little "jerky" in OSX. It may have to do with how I update and poll the mouse events. In some cases the mouse completely loses focus and has no effect when you click the button, even though it should. These are generally in parts of my own written code that do mouse-checking. It's really interesting how things can work flawlessly in one operating system, but then horribly wrong in the other. :) In any case, the port of ZD is practically finished. I just need to determine whether a new level set will accompany it. I also need to do a sanity check and make sure all of the code I did change will compile under Windows as well. Both platforms will see a new revised version of the game. If there are no new levels, it won't be anything to scramble over for you windows users, unless you like to have the latest and greatest versions of everything!

I seem to have finally sorted out the problems I've been having. The new version of apache installed on my server doesn't have a default MIME setting for .shtml files, etc. That's been updated. I'm still looking into why the forums are completely broken. In fact, it is referencing a directory it cannot get to. How this changed during that upgrade, I'm not sure. I'm looking into it though. If all else fails, I'll simply have to reinstall new forums and hopefully be able to convert the old posts over.

If you notice any other errors, please contact me as soon as possible. Thank you; and again, I'm sorry for the site being in such the state it was for the past week and a half!