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This is a callout post

This is a callout post.

I recently wrote and published a Ranma ½ oneshot fic, I’m a Kittycat, on FFNet and AO3. I got two anonymous guest reviews on the FFNet version, both of which were just so off the mark I couldn’t bear to let them pass the moderation queue.

I would’ve sent a private message to explain why every single sentence in both of them were wrong, but you can’t do that on guest reviews as there’s no account to send them to. Public it is.

So yeah, I deleted them, but kept unaltered copies for later. It’s later now, so let’s see what’s wrong with the shorter of the two. Because of spoilers, I’ll put the actual thing and my reply under readmore.

(Sidenote: what I find particularly interesting is that the two non-anonymous reviews are both positive, and these anonymous reviews were both negative…)

If you are the anonymous guest who wrote this so-called review, please do both of us a favor and don’t reply. I don’t want to know who you are.

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Regarding Shampoo – an open letter to fanfic authors

The Ranma ½ fanfiction community has a bit of a history. People like pata-hikari have written about it before, but it boils down to people copying certain elements from earlier fanfics.

This includes characters’ names.

It’s quite obvious that the three Chinese Amazons warriors have a naming theme going, as is common in manga. “Shampoo”, “Mousse”, and “Cologne”. Besides some people apparently not getting the joke and naming the functionally blind guy “Moose”, there’s the added joke, to some degree, that these are actually mutations of their “proper” Chinese names.

Unfortunately, this only holds up well for Shampoo.

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But why though?

For no good reason I just installed and ran Visual Basic 5.0… on Windows 7.

Unsurprisingly, it runs.

More unsurprisingly, there are issues. For example, the placement/sizing rectangles are unbearably sluggish, and you can’t add components to the toolbox without elevation. I mean, if you want to add, say, ComCtl32, you can check it in the list, but pressing OK just gets you a “can’t access the registry” error. You have to run VB5 as admin to make that work.

These and related issues are why I finally stopped using VB6 back then.

And that’s why the real autorun for my game is made in Visual C++, on a Win98 VM.

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Codename: OUCHMAN

So I’m making my own install/setup program for The Dating Pool, that also happens to be 100% compatible with Sierra’s games. Fun, fun. What’s was particularly funny to me is the size difference.

Sierra’s installer is at minimum three separate files. One is the installer proper @ 74.4 KB, one is the on-screen text @ 9.21 KB, and one is the driver database @ 17.2 KB, totaling 100 KB. Add to that the “install to hard drive” script file for another 1.80 KB if you want, but that’s optional.

Mine is, with all the features it has to offer so far (and I can certainly add more) a mere 34.4 KB. This includes every single bit of on-screen text. It is almost entirely self-contained. The presence of a single extra file switches it into “install to hard drive” mode, and that file merely specifies the standard target directory and the number of disks. Add another four kilobytes if you build with -DISOFONT for 256×16 bytes of extra font data, subtract about a half if you build without -DNORTON.

But then I wondered, how does Sierra’s installer do a bunch of things exactly? Like how does it know it’s being run from CD so it knows to invoke that script at the end, among other things? It’s not the presence of the script file, since that’s copied right along. So I opened it up in IDA… and was told it was compressed.

Turns out install.exe is actually a whopping 167 KB. You’ll excuse me for my curiosity…

17.7 KB. With everything but the disk install trigger file built-in. Sweet Christmas.

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Sierra’s setup/install program

Let’s summarize!

First of course we had this subdued thing. It doesn’t state its version number, and has no main menu – it just goes through all the different driver selections, then offers to copy the game to your hard drive. I got this from The Colonel’s Bequest. King’s Quest IV (1988) has the same, but with a different caption: “3D Adventure Game Setup/Installation Program”.

Unstated version, goes through a fixed script asking which driver you want and if you want to copy the game to your hard drive at the end, exactly like the original… but in color! Found this one in Space Quest IV (disk version).

Version 3.15b looks like the SQ4D version, but actually has a proper menu like those from later on. This one is from the Leisure Suit Larry 1 SCI remake.

Version 3.31 brings the finalized style. This copy is from the Space Quest I remake.

Version 3.569 is pretty much the same, but the copyright box is taller.

Version 3.681, again not much to write home about. The copyright has been amended. I got this from Space Quest III, which is chronologically confusing to me. Version 3.690, from Freddy Pharkas, bumps it up to 1991-94… but to add to the confusion, the diskette version of Freddy Pharkas is version 3.644, with a 1991-93 copyright. To round out the confusion, the SVGA version of Leisure Suit Larry 6 has installer version 3.670, copyright 1991-93 as well. What ever!

Rounding out the official installers we have King’s Quest 7′s installer, now called inst.exe, version 3.758.

And finally, because nobody asked for it…

…there’s my from-scratch rewrite. Functionally on par, this is still missing a few features such as viewing a readme file, making a boot disk, detecting if a given driver is supported to begin with (it only shows known drivers that it can find the DRV file for, like the B/W installers, but doesn’t do the “supported by your system” tick marks), only showing options in the main menu if there’s a choice – if you only have VGA320.DRV, it shouldn’t show “Graphics”. The minimal menu should only show “Mouse”, “Memory”, “Make boot disk”, “Accept”, and “Cancel”, and actually installing the game to HDD (at least, the same way Sierra’s does). But other than that, it’s basically a drop-in replacement.

That version number will reach 1.000 soon enough, mark my words.

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Evolution of a Title Screen

From day one, the title screen for The Dating Pool has been rendered, with one short intermission. Looking back at my development archives, I felt I should show the unseen. So in the inimitable words of Verka Serduchka… Let’s begin!

The original title screen was a closeup of the main character’s little black book, in what was then planned to be her bedroom. Between the default textures and the book’s cover being edited in post, I honestly can’t remember why I replaced it… but it’s not exactly evocative of a “dating pool”, or any kind of pool, really.

Ah, the original demo release’s title screen. This is actually slightly newer than it should be at this point, with the wine and glass added, but who’s keeping track? Maybe me at best, but I hardly did. Anyway, I’m not gonna hunt down a copy without the wine only to post this version a little later.

At one point I figured the 3D renders could serve as the basis for pixel art redraws. I put hours into this image, only to not use it at all. Honestly, I can’t quite remember why I gave up on that idea. But before the demo was in a playable state, I’d reverted to the render and added the wine. Perhaps it was just to not increase the workload even more, or maybe it was because it didn’t actually help solve some issues with global palettes that I’d hoped it would. Oh well, what’s a few wasted hours when you have this much free time to waste to begin with?

And that brings us to the title screen as it is now. The Itch demo has a slightly earlier version of this screen that’s a bit shinier in silly places, but otherwise it’s the same.

(2018 note: the above paragraph was later outdated by an updated demo release.)

I wonder if should put some animation in this. The old screen had the flickering candles… Anyone?

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