Airship Dragoon
Steamworks SDK Updated to Version 1.62
Bug Fix 10 Years Later
Looking at my code comments it seems I had tried to fix this 10-12 years ago ... but had not added an emergency fallback. Now there is a fallback, if the AI path to it's selected destination completely fails and cannot recover, the AI will get a random path target. ːcorblimeyguvnorː
Steamworks SDK update 1.61
However this broke how the game interacts with Steam Stats ... ːnotsohappychappyː
And so began the epic quest to search through ancient C++ to find the specific gibberish moonrunes which I had written over 10 years ago and fix it.
It wasn't a particularly big change, in fact it was a helpful one; Steam Stats are now preloaded by the Steam Client before the game is even launched. Unfortunately this means the removal of the checks for whether the stats have loaded which means that all the safety checks for loading stats now return false and the onUserStatsReceived callback is just sitting there never getting called.
So now if you bring up the console at the main menu and scroll up, you will see the achievements listed and whether you have achieved them or not ... which is just a feedback thing I made to make sure that the new code was actually working!
And that is the BIG CHANGE which deserved a MAJOR UPDATE status. I had to go back in and read through the ancient tome of C++ to find out what it all meant and make a few code changes so it works nicely with the latest Steamworks SDK and stop it sh!tting the bed.
Happy Dragoonening!
Airship Dragoon 10 YEARS on STEAM - 94% Discount!
To celebrate this milestone of me still updating the game when Valve release a new Steamworks SDK update, Airship Dragoon is on discount to the tune of a whopping 94%! Mostly because I can't put it to 95% because Valve has to figure in the costs of payment processing ... so 94% was as low as I can go.
Back in the heady days of Greenlight (which was a thing a long time ago in a galaxy quite close) I begged for over 10,000 upvotes to get on to Steam. Now anyone can pay 100 bucks and just beg Valve.
This was back in the day when indie key bundles were ten-to-a-penny and a whopping 88.2% of Airship Dragoon key activation appear to come from them. Actual Steam sales coming in at ~2K.
Unsurprisingly The US of A tops the sales/activation charts, with possibly slightly more surprisingly Soviet Russia coming second, but also the Far East does feature prominently with Korea, edging out China and Japan for 7th place.
The second spike was when I created "Airship Dragoonette" for the cover image.
In her original form, and the newer version, when I got a 21" tablet pen display, which makes drawing on a screen so much easier than blindly fumbling around with the cheapest tablet I could previously find.
So what were the actual profits? A new gaming PC for development and a cheap(ish) XP-Pen Tablet Display for drawing and dev.
Here is the a picture of the ancient mid-range Dell I developed Airship Dragoon on, a machine so weak I could not turn shadows on, though some nice dev in America actual mailed me a GTS250 GPU (remember them?) so I could get over 30 fps finally. Thanks Matt! ːhappychappyː And it's next to the new devbox I bought which has a 1070 GPU (which was pretty high spec when I got it).
So with my brand new (but now like 8 years old) devbox, I set about updating Airship Dragoon, and making a number of concept demos for my next game.
After a while I thought an Early Access release might help me get some feedback and bug hunting ... but I expect the market is awash with no-name indiedevs hoping for feedback and bug reports with their Early Access release.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1789310/Monsters_Loot_Swag/
Monsters Loot Swag didn't really get any traction, and alas the bug report forum contains no bug reports. Upgrading Torque3D MIT - the open source game engine I use, however did bring a new suite of script compiler tools which really helped me hunt down and squash some game breaking bugs - most of which were caused by typos in local variables, whilst I learned about asset systems and Physical-Based Rendering (PBR) materials and reflections, bringing myself into the 21st Century of game development were DX9.0c is no longer a thing.
Monsters Loot Swag is 90% complete in Early Access, and will finally ship in Spring 2025.
Hopefully the game after that one won't take 8 years to complete ... though I said that before. ːnotsohappychappyː
In the meantime, happy Dragooning across the Super-Continent of Pangea for the glory of Steampunk Imperialism!ːcorblimeyguvnorː
Airship Dragoon Updated To Steamworks Version 1.60
Hope everyone has been enjoying summer, it's been a mixed bag at my Veg Patch. The Strawberry crop has been devastated by rain, the Swiss Chard is about to bolt, but the Lettuce is coming through strong, and a single Legume is appearing.
Tune in this August for the 10th Anniversary of Airship Dragoon on Steam and more info on my veg patch.
Steamworks Update and Human Readable Files
Included in this update is the total removal of all pre-runtime compiled *.dso files, which have been replaced with the human readable *.cs code script files.
This will aid anyone who fancies a bit of user generated content - or modding as we used to call it in the good old days, though having a look at the Steamworks page on setting up Steam Workshop ... turns out it's a bit more complicated than just pointing Steam towards the mod folder. ːnotsohappychappyː
However that mod folder already has the "Realism Mod" in it, just to prove that modding has always worked.
Airship Dragoon has been on Steam for 9.5 years now. ːcorblimeyguvnorː
Steam Awards - Labor Of Love
No really ... ːnotsohappychappyː
Microsoft retired Visual Studio 2013, but Airship Dragoon's dependencies are not compatible with the latest Visual Studio. Not a problem until last year when they locked me out of my own build because my license went "stale" ( too much yeast perhaps?) and the online product connection has been shut down.
The solution? The OFFICIAL™ solution as posted on the Microsoft forums?
Hack it. Hack regedit. So I did and can now access my build again.
Airship Dragoon, released 26 Aug, 2014 ... last updated 30 October 2023 - and there will be more to come.
ːcorblimeyguvnorː
Steamworks Update Patch
∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿
Leet Haxxor and Steamworks Updated to v1.58
Microsoft retired Visual Studio 2013, but Airship Dragoon's dependencies are not compatible with the latest Visual Studio. Not a problem until last year when they locked me out of my own build because my license went "stale" ( too much yeast perhaps?) and the online product connection has been shut down.
The solution? The OFFICIAL™ solution as posted on the Microsoft forums?
Hack it. Hack regedit. So I did and can now access my build again.
So here's an update. Nothing fancy, just Steamworks updated to the latest version.
Airship Dragoon, released 26 Aug, 2014 ... updated 15 September 2023.