Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

Triage Saturday 1st May 2010

Another Boxer 1.0 alpha build is up, sporting some of the mouse control improvements discussed in the previous post. Boxer’s existing mouse cursor behaviour is still the default, but locking the mouse is now just a Cmdclick away: quick, intuitive and obvious. I'll be improving both behaviours further in the coming builds, but I'm already much happier with how they work.

This build also features three fewer features:

After reading Rework, 37signals’ guide to kicking yourself in the pants, I felt inspired to start viciously pruning Boxer’s feature-set for the looming release of 1.0. These were fallow features full of bugs and awkward flaws; there was no way they would be finished to my satisfaction before 1.0, were I to release before the oceans boil and all life on Earth comes to an end.

I’m casting my eye around for other fripperies to send to the guillotine, but in any case once game installation is in then I’ll institute a feature-freeze and start calling everything a beta instead.

Commentary

  1. Thank you so much for creating such a fantastic app, and 1.0 will be a wonderful occasion for celebration I am sure.

    I actually like the way you handled (HA!) mouse handling in this latest alpha release. I haven't tried it yet with a game like Duke Nukem 3-D yet, but I will make sure I check that out.

    BJ

    BJ Wanlund Saturday 1st May 2010

  2. This major improvement! But??? UnLock toggle appears to be Click outside of Boxer/DOSBox window, else the Cursor tries to follow the Cursor.

    chipmck Saturday 1st May 2010

  3. Chip, I'm afraid I didn't understand a thing you just wrote. Could you run that by me again?

    Alun Bestor Saturday 1st May 2010

  4. When you run the cursor out of the window, there are two cursors - one inside of Boxer and one outside. The cursor in the Boxer windows tries to track the 'outside' one, until there is a click on the outside - this breaks the connect between the two. Oh, the cursor was never locked inside the Boxer window, but functioned properly inside the Boxer window.

    chipmck Sunday 2nd May 2010

  5. Right, that's been Boxer's (and DOSBox's) behaviour from the start: when the mouse is unlocked, the OS X cursor is free to roam wherever it may and the DOS cursor will follow it, even after it leaves the window. When the mouse is locked, the mouse can't leave the window at all, and that is all that is meant by locking.

    If the DOS cursor didn't continue to follow the mouse outside the window, then there would be a distracting jump as soon as the mouse re-entered the window. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but neither is there a real benefit in leaving the DOS cursor exactly at the point where the mouse left the window. There's more discussion of the implications of the current approach in the issue ticket however.

    Alun Bestor Sunday 2nd May 2010

  6. Great work! And I applaud your pruning of features to focus on a quality release. Keep it up!

    Calpchen Monday 3rd May 2010
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