DreamTracker Dev Log

[desertfish]

Heheheh 90's eurodance. I wasn't a fan at the time, but have to admit it's kinda cool to hear it in this form

[m00dawg]

DreamTracker 0.68 is out! This is the Infinite Scroll edition! Not too much else obvious to the user, though lots under the covers with the module loading re-org and converting the UI elements to be drawn programmatically. This is most visible in the new (but not yet necessarily better) loading and help screens. Some bugs crushed too but mostly it's the kick-ass pattern scroll stuff. Download link is in the first post (dreamtracker.org).

[m00dawg]

While I had planned on having the next version of DT out soonish, I decided to go full steam ahead into the effects reorg and have been making changes within a branch just in case folks are building from source and/or I need to do any minor fixins to the current release.

The next release will have the effects reorg changes. Many of these are in the docs within the branch but you can see them here as well. Additionally I have been changing out the static screen buffer files for drawing the display more programmatically which is both faster and makes things easier for me to change things around without quite so much toil. This required updating some of my printing functions to be a bit more intelligent which took some time. I'm also trying to crush some long standing bugs, such as lack of error reporting / freeze if you try to load a file that doesn't exist. Stuff like that.

Back to the reorg, now that I have loadable modules, that means I have a lot more code space. Previously I was worried about adding non-essential or one-time use code to DT for fear of running out of RAM. That's much less of a problem now and, as such, I will now have in-app file-conversions. That means if you load an older song, DT will convert it to the current song format. It won't be the fastest operation but this both presents a decent user experience while allowing the DT file format to change and grow more organically without breaking compatibility.

All these changes I think are enough for me to perhaps consider making the next release of Dreamtracker the first Beta release which would be a huge milestone. Beta doesn't necessarily mean it's feature-complete (noting tables/macros are still planned). Just that it's solid enough that I don't expect file breaking issues between versions.

Anyways the gap to the next release given all of the above and some travel I have coming up might be a bit longer than it has been lately but I think it'll be very much worth it!

[mortarm]

...making the next release of Dreamtracker the first Beta release...

Yes! Just what I've been waiting for. Can't wait to break..er, play with it.

[m00dawg]

Oh don't worry, there will still be plenty of breaking things

[m00dawg]

Alright just a quick update for folks that wanna try it out. It's not "released" yet (as in it's not the main download link off dreamtracker.org) but here's a pre-release / work-in-progress of version 0.69, hopefully the last alpha, which contains the effects reorg and song conversion:

https://www.dreamtracker.org/downloads/ ... .69-pr.zip