The log
What I've been building
A note every week or two on what actually changed across the projects — what shipped, what broke, and what the fix turned out to be.
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The self-test that never pressed Save, and ten projects with new downloads
Two Windows downloads, Album Builder's and Snatch's, failed the moment they saved a file — and both had passed their release checks, because no check ever saved one. Every one of the twenty projects moved this week and ten of them published new downloads. Four learned to update themselves, and Pressless tripped on the same missing signing key that Rolodex did last week.
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The update that could never install, and Pressless's first download
Rolodex has always checked the signature on an update before installing it — against a key that was deliberately blank, so "Update now" was a button that could only ever fail. Pressless published its first real download, and its first attempt failed in exactly the place last week's post said it would. UT Ants grew a sky, water and a gamepad. Sixteen projects moved; four were quiet.
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The map that drew at an eighth of its brightness, and UT Ants draws
UT Ants went from reading maps to drawing them — and the first map it drew came out at an eighth of the original game's brightness, until the original was photographed and the difference measured. Ants Terminal 0.7.109 went stable while a week of freeze fixes waits in a preview. Pressless can now import a whole WordPress archive. And three projects found checks that said "passed" without looking at anything.
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The problem that turned out not to exist, and Games Hub reaches 1.0
Last week I told you Pressless could never finish its first publish. I measured it this week and it was not true — so here is the correction, and what the measurement cost to get. Games Hub shipped 1.0.0, its first. Contact List found that its Google sync had never worked in a single downloadable copy, with 428 tests passing over the top of it. And UT Ants went from reading nothing to reading real Unreal Tournament maps end to end.
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A button that cleared everything, and a week of checks that were not checking
RetroDB's "Clear scraped data" promised to clear a dozen games and cleared thousands — four releases in three days went out behind it. DOOM Ants had 251 findings read out of it, and found that both of the instruments meant to catch such things had been reporting success without measuring anything. Seven projects turned up the same shape in one week. Plus Games Hub 0.5.0, Snatch 1.1.0, and a new project: UT Ants.
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The helper that was never called, and a release that shipped the wrong build
Snatch's first release shipped a helper that unlocks most of YouTube's picture qualities, and never once used it — 4 entries where there should have been 37. DOOM Ants 0.7.1 published a binary built before the fix it was cut for. Games Hub 0.4.0 went out, and then all fourteen games learned to be readable.
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A button that did nothing, and the settings Windows kept throwing away
OneUp's Restart-services button turned out to do absolutely nothing, and had been doing nothing quietly. DOOM Ants 0.7.1, finbreak 0.1.21 and OneUp 1.4.5 all went out, and Vestige spent a week with no light shafts on two of its three quality settings.
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A freeze one launch in forty, and fourteen games in one window
DOOM Ants had a Windows startup freeze that only happened about 2% of the time, which is the worst rate a bug can have. Games Hub shipped 0.3.0, this site got a Games section, and now it has this.
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424 MB thrown away, and a new project goes public
OneUp was deleting everything it had successfully downloaded whenever an update failed. Also, Local Web Server Manager exists now, and MAME Curator finally reads its own settings.
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A release that had been cancelling itself for three weeks
Vestige's weekly release train was killing its own build every single run, and the only symptom was a version that never appeared. Plus the terminal's heaviest week yet, and finbreak's import gets honest.
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OneUp went 1.0 to 1.4 in six days
A first stable release turned into four more inside a week, because shipping it to people who were not me found things I could not. Plus DOOM's raster view roughly doubles its frame rate.
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Starting a log, and a week of small sharp releases
The first entry — why there is one now, plus DOOM Ants 0.4.0, two Rolodex releases in two days, and a meadow that finally has real grass in it.