Another fruitful year is coming to a close! It’s once again time for our annual review to reflect on the year’s milestones and look ahead with renewed focus at the months to come. In terms of both technical achievements and content expansion, 2024 was a huge year for Cogmind… but first, the traditional opening collage ..read more

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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