Introduction

In October I worked on the different difficulty levels of Pixel Wheels, and I am happy to report it's done and has been merged. While this looked simple there were quite a few details to take care of.

Introduction

Finally, Pixel Wheels 0.26.0 has been released! It's been a long time coming. Now that it's out, I can focus on the last big feature I want to add before 1.0.0: difficulty levels.

Introduction

I often read about the obnoxious Linux evangelist, looking down on Mac or Windows users. As a non-evangelist Linux user I often experience the opposite. These days it mostly comes from Mac users, because Mac hardware is popular among developers. This article lists some of the reasons I don't use a Mac. It's not meant to convince you to change your mind, it exists so that I can send it to condescending Mac users (Did I just send you this article? Sorry, not sorry).

Finally

It's here, Pixel Wheels 0.26.0 is available for download!

Major changes

If you have been following my status updates, none of this will be new to you, but here is a summary of the major changes brought by this new version.

New track: "The Island"

The "Pix Cities" championship has its third track. This track is called "The Island" and take place on... an island, you guessed it. It's a long track where you get to race along the walls of an ancient castle and on a narrow boardwalk with water on both sides. Careful!

(Note that these are zoomed out screenshots, vehicles do not look that small when playing!)

The addition of this track means all championships now have 3 tracks. This is an important milestone for me because this is one of my 1.0.0 requirements.

Release or not?

So, has the new version of Pixel Wheels been released? Well... not yet... but it's almost there! Translators have updated their translations (thanks!), I did a few adjustments and a bunch of testing. It looks good so far.

UI tweaks

The addition of the Island track made the track selector in the "Quick Race" screen too cramped. A few months ago I redesigned it to use a primary-secondary layout: first row shows the championship, second row shows the tracks in the currently selected championship. This scales much better, but touch mode was a bit broken: one had to "double-touch" on a championship to see its tracks, so I fixed that.

I now understand why lists in many mobile games only show one item at a time, with previous / next buttons to navigate. It's not super efficient, but it makes it possible to show an item and details about it, which is difficult in a UI without notion of cursor hovering or focus.

Island adjustments

"The Island" received a few final touches: I defined track records for it, but while driving it other and other I realized the long straight line at the bottom was a bit boring, so I added some extra turbo tiles to spruce it up.

Introduction

So, in my last status update I said there would probably be a Pixel Wheels release in July and... it did not happen. Vacations and planned surgery did not help making this month super productive 😁. I nevertheless made some progress on Pixel Wheels. Let's get through them.

Galician translation

First, Pixel Wheels received a new translation, this time it's Galician, by Ninjum. Thanks!

Merchandising

Pixel Wheels is getting some merchandising! I created a Pixel Wheels collection on RedBubble. In great dogfooding tradition, I am probably going to order a T-shirt or a cap at some point 😉.

Introduction

Last month was a release month! As I hinted in my previous status update, I had a bunch of overdue releases to publish, and I am happy to report they all went out!

Clyde

On June 16, I released Clyde 0.8.0. This new version does not bring game-changing modifications, but it makes Clyde nicer to use.

I am especially happy with clyde doc new ability to list the URLs for the homepage and repository of a package: this ensures there is always a way to get a bit of information about a given app.

It's been a very long time since the last release of SFXR-Qt, my Qt port of SFXR retro sound effect generator.

A few bug reports have accumulated since then, as well as some build fixes, patiently waiting to see the day they would be released. It was time to blow the dust off this repository. I tackled a few of the bugs and wrapped version 1.5.1.

Introduction

Another 2-months-at-a-time update because real-world life kept me really busy lately. This report will be about Pixel Wheels again.

The rotating camera is back!

Pixel Wheels camera initially rotated so that the player vehicle was always pointing to the top of the screen. This way you never pressed Left when you actually wanted to go right but the vehicle was pointing down.

I was a big fan of this behavior, but others were not: it can make players a bit dizzy. It first became an option, but eventually got removed because it clashed with a rework of the multiplayer mode where all players shared the same screen.

This multiplayer mode change eventually got reverted, so the rotating camera could be brought back. Except I did not have the energy to do so. This is where contributor Compl Yue stepped in: he re-implemented the rotating camera mode, bringing this feature back from the dead.

The focus of this month was on Clyde. There was a number of changes I wanted to make, and I am happy to report I was able to implement most of them and release Clyde 0.7.0 on April 2!

New command: clyde doc

If a package provides documentation in its release assets, such as a README or an FAQ, Clyde packages install them in $CLYDE_HOME/inst/share/doc/<package_name>. If it provides man pages, they get installed in $CLYDE_HOME/inst/share/man/man<number>. This is useful, but let's face it, it's too much effort to cd there and open these files.

Enter clyde doc! Pass this new command a package name: it lists all documentation files provided by the package, let you pick one and opens it for you. If it's a man page it opens it with man, if it's a text file it uses your preferred pager, and for other file types like PDF it starts the system default application for this file.

Here is how it looks if I run it on ripgrep:

$ clyde doc ripgrep
  share/doc/ripgrep/CHANGELOG.md
> share/doc/ripgrep/FAQ.md
  share/doc/ripgrep/GUIDE.md
  share/doc/ripgrep/README.md
  share/man/man1/rg.1

You can control the > arrow with the up and down keys, then press Enter to read the selected file.

I am fan of offline documentation, but offline documentation is not always easy to reach. This feature has been on the back of my mind for a long time, I am happy to have it now!