Eleven Months Later, a Speech Bubble Update

Hello friends. I'm still around, if in a mostly lurktacular sense.

I've gotten a little fed up with myself and my bad habit of posting "hey, look at this thing I'm working on!" and then never releasing it, or in this case, releasing it almost a year later. It's something I have mixed feelings on because on one hand I feel like it's important to document the process of things so that other can chime in and maybe learn from it, and on the other hand, it stresses me out so much to have little loose ends of projects I haven't finished floating around out there. I've also kind of come to the conclusion that I think gain a lot more satisfaction out of documenting and discussing the process with people than actually finishing/releasing something. But of course, just talking or posting about something doesn't do much to help people who just want to see the finished product!

I think the standard I am going to try to set for myself is to only post about an unfinished project if A) I require more feedback/information from the public to move forward on a project, B) if the documentation of the process can help people in some way, such as including discoveries or notes about how a particular aspect of CAOS, genetics, or the brain works, or C) If it's a particularly large project that I've already posted about previously and people are asking about how it's going.

My previous post about the Speech Bubble Update accomplished none of those things. In fact, in the time that it took to write up that post, I probably could have finished up the expanded sprites that I was too lazy to work with and just released the thing. This is the sort of posting I'm looking to avoid in the future. I'd like to indulge my desire to just talk about stuff pointlessly a little bit less, if it means I can get more done in the very limited time I have to develop these days.

But anyway, moping aside, you can now download the Speech Bubble Upgrades!

Just to refresh you, the purpose of these updates is twofold:

To provide a larger speech bubble so creatures with long names can completely express themselves.

And to allow easier directing of commands to specific norns, Prefacing a command with 'hey' will direct that command to your currently selected norn, without you having to type out their whole, ridiculous name.

The zip file contains a .cos you can just drop in your bootstrap if you don't want to have to fiddle with injecting it every time, but if you go this route make you you inject the agent into a world at least once first to ensure the new speech bubble file gets extracted.

Also, happy CCSF everyone! For once I'm not completely skipping out this year, but like usual I didn't make any formal submissions either since I'm so awful with deadlines and painfully subject to altering and finishing things at the last minute. Nevertheless I'm going to do my best to use the festival as motivation to get a few posts made over the next few days, so look forward to that!

(Note: The Speech Bubble Upgrade was updated on 11-27-17 to fix a critical bug reported by Pixis (Thank you Pixis!) The download link has been updated to the newer version, however, if you want the old, broken version (for some reason) you can still download it here.)

(Also note: The Speech Bubble Upgrade received a substantial update for CCSF 2021 to add support for custom styles! You can check out the release post for more details. If you prefer the old version, you can still download it here. If you prefer a camera-shy version of the old version, check out Invisible Speech Bubble Plus!)