It's just what I asked for, but not what I wanted

Just random thoughts today. Tomorrow I leave Singapore and return to the land of the free and the home of the brave. What a trip this has been. I should write a book.

Today was alpha-channel day; the day I finally added support for images which already have an alpha channel to render their transparency correctly. Apparently some people aren't satisfied with using magenta as their transparency color, they want REAL transparency. And of course getting it to work required a few bizarre hacks but hopefully now the rough spots are over.

And now I can kick back and see what, if anything, people do with it. I've often implemented things at the request of somebody, thinking that if I removed this last dam then a steady stream of new sprites, objects, maps, characters, or dirty limericks would issue forth. I don't recall that ever being the case.

All the same I continue to believe that the most important things I can do to continue improving the game is to fix bugs and implement features that people have asked for. I'm particularly interested in adding features people have taken the time to log on the SourceForge site, because filling out that form is just enough of a pain in the ass that it proves people are at least a little bit interested in getting the feature.

Hopefully tomorrow on the 14-hour plane ride from Hong Kong to San Fran I'll get the new sprite system designed to my satisfaction. Now THAT is something I personally can't wait to get in place, it's hard to stop thinking of new ways to use some of the things we've got planned. The trick will be to make it easy for other people to understand and use.