Retroquad 0.12.0 Released (Patreon)

First of all, I'm sorry for being mostly silent in the last month. For several weeks after recovering from covid-19 I had burning headaches that made it impossible for me to concentrate on coding. It's weird how the side effects of this disease keeps coming and going for several weeks.

Second, the text renderer had some roadblocks which made me lose several days trying to debug things. The 2D rasterizer isn't good enough yet, there are some big distortions when trying to partially crop the low-res text characters; this made it impossible for me to implement smooth scrolling of text, which was something I really wanted to achieve before moving on. Smooth text scrolling is needed for several GUI features, and would allow for long lines of text to be used everywhere, making it easier to implement multilanguage support later.

Support for tab characters also had issues. The text renderer can't keep the tabulations aligned when the text is scrolled horizontally, which makes the whole line jitter while scrolling. Due to this, tab character support was disabled completely for now.

All things considered, text rendering is a lot more complex than I anticipated. Definitely more complex than 2D sprite rendering. This can be seen by looking at the amount of conditional "if" statements in the function M_PrintText. It's not pretty, and I likely need to figure out a more efficient approach.

Anyway, here's how to use the Readme text viewer:

• In the "New game from map" menu, press R to open the readme file for the selected map. If there's a readme file available, it will be displayed.
• Word wrapping is enabled by default. You can toggle it by pressing W.
• Press Up, Down, Left or Right to scroll. Scrolling can also be done using the mouse wheel.

Page Up, Page Down, Home and End are not implemented yet.

These toggling controls aren't intuitive enough, but I'm going to add a submenu to the maps menu with options to play the map, open the readme file and change the skill.

Other than that, the priority right now is to refactor the whole menu code to make it simpler and easier to maintain.

Some patrons had payment issues this month, but it's not clear what happened because the billing status is showing up as "other" instead of "declined". I'm contacting Patreon support to clarify this, but you can feel free to message me about what happened.