They’re alive! Last month I shared a sizeable collection of interface mockups summarizing my vision for a playable Cogmind interface that could fit within a 45-row terminal. Those mockups are now a reality, fully implemented more or less as described, and in the time since I’ve even gone further down that path and implemented the so-called “Phase 4” UI with its greater number of modal windows. Although I already demonstrated much of the first new modal UI layout in an earlier forum announcement, I figure I could review those features here in order to provide closure to this series, plus cover ..read more

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A long time in coming, but here we go! This marks the beginning of what will be the most significant undertaking in Cogmind’s UI development history: making everything bigger. Not just the map, for which zooming was recently implemented as a toggleable option, but all the text as well. This will be fun since I do love me some interface work, as evidenced by the massive number of optional QoL features I’ve introduced over the years, but despite pouring many hours into accessibility and streamlined gameplay before, this particular feature took the longest to get to. Back in Cogmind’s early years ..read more

Well then, we’re well into Cogmind’s 10th year now xD It’s kinda hard to nail down a clear “ten-year” mark, since we could measure Cogmind’s age from its birth as a 7DRL nearly 12 years ago, or when I started working on it full time in mid-2013, or its first commercial release in May 2015, but anyway yeah this is my 10th annual review, a thing I started doing every year since I decided to build this world of robots in full. In previous years I’ve opened the review with a collage of dev images of varying themes and content, but approaching the end of this year we have one major theme that stand ..read more

The core functionality of our map zooming feature is operating smoothly--common windows are popping up where they’re supposed to go, map interaction itself appears normal… however there are plenty of less vital systems that still need to consider the effect of zooming. And after those there’s the public-facing side of this feature, like how do you access it, and do we need to animate it? Odds and Ends Gotta check every little thing, like the tiles-ASCII toggling animation, does that work? Nope. How about the map export function? Nope. Anyway yeah just a case of going in and seeking out wha ..read more

Time to get serious! Last time I told you about my engine upgrade and the new “quads,” now it’s to put them to use. If you recall, for my initial Cogmind map zoom demo upon adding Quad support to REX, all I did was change one thing in the game: the map font size. The game doesn’t care about the engine side of things so it simply worked, or at least didn’t crash and we could easily see how it’d appear, despite of course numerous input and secondary display issues in some other windows. By just tweaking a few more variables it would be easy to solve all those problems in order to purely have a c ..read more

Taking a different tack from last time, I decided that it would be worth getting really dirty with low-level engine work for the next attempt at map zooming. One of the main reasons we’d need to go this route if there’s ever to be hope of reasonable performance in software mode: Dirty rects. If we play by the engine rules we get to keep that functionality in its existing simple package, which generally means massive savings on CPU cycles. REX It had been a while since I’d done any serious tinkering in “Rogue Engine X” (REX), Cogmind’s underlying game engine. The acronym you might recognize fro ..read more