Thanks to Damien for sending in a Zep's Dreamland package for Puppy Linux! I am currently unable to test it, but I have no doubts that it works perfectly fine. You can find it on the Zep's Dreamland page. If there are any issues, please let me know.

Ironically, today I bit the bullet and started tinkering around with examining this shearing problem. I did some more testing using my simple test bed "vanilla-Allegro" application that forces shearing. I tossed some AllegroGL its way, and instead of using the built in functions for displaying images, I did the texture drawing on a polygon by hand. While this yielded better results, there was still a bit of shearing to be that. That is, you could notice a horizontal shear-line making its way down the monitor from top to bottom, jittering along the way. Once hitting the bottom of the screen it would disappear for a while, and then come back to... be annoying, I suppose.

Once that happened, I had enough. I couldn't imagine why using pure OpenGL calls would still result in shearing goodness, even when I was explicitly forcing vsync through the graphic card hardware. I skittered back to my very old OSX framework and tried to see if I could reproduce the shearing with it. While the drawing mechanisms and setup were slightly different, I was able to take the same graphic data (converted to png as opposed to a bmp) and replicate the same scenario as the vanilla test. That is: take a 640x480 bitmap and scroll it across the screen, repeating. The test worked flawlessly, save that my rendering code is off by a single pixel. That said, I didn't notice any shearing in fullscreen versus Windowed mode. There were hiccups here and there, but I think I can attribute that mostly to normal system bumps and process task switching.

I still need to do more investigation as to why the AllegroGL application still has the shearies. As far as I know, it shouldn't. It could very well be calling AllegroGL's gl buffer flipping function. I'll have to see if there's a way to do the flipping myself, forcing glFlush'es and whatnot. I hope it will yield non shearing results -- because the conversion of Neverfall to OpenGL would be a lot easier than writing my own custom framework for everything other than graphics rendering, that's for sure.

It's been a bit of a long process but most of the pains of migrating to the are over. I've been setting up a whole bunch of web-related stuff which has taken away from any serious game development time.

During that break, however, I've been thinking hard about what my approach to this shearing issue is going to be. I took some time to write a little test-bed application which serves the sole purpose of creating shearing on purpose. I'm basically trying to find the most simple representation of what's happening in my current project so that I may attempt to debug it and hopefully solve the issue on a very small scale. If I can come up with a good solution that is scalable to how the project runs now, then I may very well run with it. My main fear, though, is that what will end up being the proper solution is using true plain OpenGL calls through AllegroGL. That is, not using the utility AllegroGL blitting function, but something custom of my own that I can ensure does things correctly. Across various platforms I get all sorts of weird differences in how textures draw themselves--something which I've detailed in other postings.

I have even thought of reviving my old framework project and attempting to make something more useful and/or cross platform out of it. I'm not sure if that will really take off, though.

If you're seeing this message, then the transfer to new servers is complete. Woohoo!

So it looks like my servers got hacked. That's awesome, especially considering that my hosting didn't bother to email me about the problem. Additionally, they claim it isn't their fault and that it's some wacko trojan that injects stuff into your files as you're FTPing them to your server. I don't believe that for a second, since I can simply reupload my files and the injected scripts are removed. It may very well be the fault of some other user that allowed junk to run rampant and then infect my own files (since it's shared hosting). It could additionally be something I've done, but as far as I can tell everything is pretty secure.

In any case, I've reuploaded the entire site. I'm looking into what I can do about this problem to prevent it in the future, and potentially get to the bottom of how it happened in the first place. I've been itching to find some better, more feature-full hosting. This could very well be the ticket that changes everything.

There's nothing new to report, really. On the DS front I've been trying to find out why, when drawing a tile map onto one of the available backgrounds, some other background is being painted with garbage in a single pixel for each tile drawn. It's as if the background being "junkified" has a region in the upper left corner which is a super small representation of the regular tile map I'm drawing elsewhere. I'm sure it must have something to do with my setup, but I haven't figured out exactly what it is yet (obviously).

In other news, I've downloaded XNA but haven't tinkered with it yet. I want to explore what it has to offer. It seems like it has a pretty nice following, and the website is littered with tutorials and examples. If anything, it will be a fun little diversion, much like my "spare-time" DS development has been.

It may seem like I'm floundering around trying to learn new technologies, and I suppose to some extent that's true. It's fun learning new stuff!