Earlier today I dusted off a Raspberry pi 400, gave it a fresh install of RaspiOS and then got DreamyDesktopPrototype running on it from a build.

The install instructions are a bit convoluted, but have extra steps to help fault find like doing an install of Dreamchess unmodified to see if anyone hitting a problem is one with the upstream code or something I’ve changed.

I reran it later and got it working so I now consider the project at version 0.8 where people can build and play a rough around the edges version.

0.9 is to have bugfixes and get some more play testing. Part of this is I’m looking to have a top comment decides game at the AnarchyChess community I’ve made announcements to before.

1.0 will hopefully have updated graphics for wallpapers and a 3D Knook. I tried to get a 3D editor for the CDN? Files but nothing I downloaded could open it successfully. Good news is the source that opens them is fully accessible and the files are in a text format. I trimmed the Rook file to remove some textures? And its now visually different to a rook but looks like its a ghost with some pieces missing.

Going big and facing a possible blue screen seg fault goes against most of my software eng background, but to keep some momentum up I’m sticking with go hard or go home for now and try and test rigorously quickly. Plus it’ll be the first official games and I wanted to open invite and hope it’s memorable. Hopefully not for wrong reasons. Should kickoff about 35 hours from now.

This also marks the end of using the prototype repository and a move to the new and hopefully longstanding repository where branches and meaningful commit messages are used. I convinced myself I can’t send stuff upstream by mistake and if I do, it shouldn’t be incoherent crap.

I liked the Cowboy seat of pants development, but it can’t go on forever.

Tomorrow I’ll start bringing in code changed to new repository and look to use it to make official releases/builds.

I will revisit the build instructions and make it streamlined and more command line oriented while still trying to be accessible to someone who never used a command line before but has sufficient admin access on target PC.

I’ll change default piece set to figurine, increase size of K on Knook and remove the default engine text of dreamer and set default game type to Human vs Human.

I’ll also see about putting some semantic versioning in the display credits text.