50,029 and I've run out of steam...

I hit 50,029 words last night, so the NaNoWriMo goal is done. On the one hand, this is bad: I have a lot more story left to write. On the porny side, there's still a shaving scene between Polly & Zia, Dove getting too comfortable with the twins-- and trying to explain them to her Tech Level 12 workmates what they are, never mind their approbation at her actually hanging out with, eww, males!-- Illonca and Rhiane getting married, a rocky patch between Saul and Khrystyne on one side and Dove and the twins on the other, result in the twins totally rocking Khrystyne's world for a night only to send her back to Saul because, really, they're hooked on Dove, lots of side stuff... Oh, yeah, and Kaede & Eshi have a cameo.

Unfortunately, as the story has proceeded, it has become clear to me that I have little clue what's really going on. The story has to be about something. I need to go back and reformulate what's going on. It's now a work in revision, but that's what first drafts always are.

Freespace 2 fixed!

I fixed Freespace 2. It actually wasn't a bug in the game code, but in the SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) driver.

The real problem lay in the joystick identifier code. It seems that my joystick is so old that it identifies itself to the computer as a "Microsoft SideWinder Precision Pro," but the code is looking for something calling itself a "SideWinder Precision Pro." I duplicated the Sidewinder line in the identifier array and added the word "Microsoft" to the duplicate and viola! I have a working joystick again.

Unfortunately, fixing it under Gentoo required a bit of a twist. I had to install the driver once, then start installing the driver again, stopping it halfway through the install, putting in the patch, and then manually calling install once more. That way the Gentoo database knows that it's SDL version 2.11 installed, and I know it's the one with the correct driver.

I guess I should submit a patch to the Gentoo maintainers.

Freespace was meant to run on a Pentium with a Voodoo 2 card. Running on an AMD 3100 with a 512 NVidia GE5 series card, I can turn on all the special effects and stellar light, and it's really a beautiful game. One of the most underappreciated space sims ever written, the best one made really-- unfortunately, its competitors the year it came out were an unremarkable Wing Commander edition and the Star Wars Rebel Assault space sim, which had just awful gameplay and visuals but was the 800 lb. gorilla of marketing. I'm grateful to Volition for freeing the code, and to Icculus and Indiegames for porting it to Linux