Nova

MS Paint on 11 can open WebP at least. Yeah if you're stuck on outdated or discontinued software for whatever reason then that will lead to compatibility problems.

I'm glad I used a subdomain for those for stylistic purposes because that meant that I could just point them at a different IP than the main site and no links have been broken and no redirects are needed.

Moved my blog and wiki to my secondary VPS with more RAM and storage, just in case Tilemap Town (which runs on the main one) needs room to grow later, or if I want to host something where latency matters (because I have the whole Atlantic Ocean sitting between me and the secondary one).

Yeah it used to be pretty bad. And then software started supporting it but websites didn't let you upload it for awhile?

Of course if someone has an old image editor they like that isn't getting updates (like my perpetual license for an old version of Clip Studio Paint) they still run into problems

Since I have an XMPP server all set up, it could be cool to put it on there, and then maybe set up bridges with whatever cool chat platforms people use these days. Maybe I could create an XMPP/Stoat bridge??

Still kind of want to have a go at making a nonsexual furry chat for people who like or have toy characters (like pooltoys/plushies/rubber/balloons) but now the problem of what platform to put it on is trickier than before. Plus getting the word out when people mostly don't follow me for that.

What software are you thinking of that doesn't support it? Windows can show it in folders, Aseprite and GIMP can edit it, Discord/Telegram/Signal/Gajim/Stoat let you send it and view it. Mastodon lets me upload it. The only software I can immediately think of that doesn't let you use WEBP is Steam.

Second Life screenshot of a light green cartoon pony with a magenta mane and tail, and an orange scarf. She appears to be made of vinyl and has visible seams and shine. She's standing on some grass in front of a house.

I found out about marketplace.secondlife.com/p/OP-Pool-to... so I set up a version of my Sherbet pony avatar using it. I use Sherbet more often than Maffi on Second Life so it'll be fun to be a toy as her too sometimes.

Very different kind of game from Dragon Quest Builders (and really, anything I've ever played before?) while still being very similar. I miss blocks themselves being a very significant part of the gameplay but maybe they will be more important later.

Having fun with Pokopia so far! Feels like I'm juggling a whole bunch of different goals at the same time, but it has tools to help me keep track, and it can remind me where stuff is and what I'm doing. I like how open ended it is and how I can do stuff in whatever order I want.

im so glad that y'all fought against using Fedi because you didn't wanna be on a site run like a "digital fiefdom" only to do exactly that and pick "Fedi except worse and almost entirely centralized around a Silicon Valley startup BUT looks like Twitter"

Pokopia releases really soon and I'm excited to try it. I like voxel building stuff and prefer to have the emphasis be on the building itself rather than on being a survival game.

I've been having problems with Fluxer's UI putting things like the friend requests username text box off-screen, so I'll have to give them credit for that brand new UI innovation

In my experience, simple shading is not very difficult to do, but drastically improves how good a sprite looks in a way that's disproportionate to the amount of effort you have to put in. And it's easy to fill out a 15 color palette if you pick like 4-6 colors and add some shades and highlights.

A lot of discussion about NES dev and SNES dev seems to push into emphasizing the difficulty of drawing art that looks like SNES art, but SNES art styles are so varied that you're probably good if you have some basic shading or are visibly using more than 3 colors per sprite.

The way the Advance Wars games are named in Japan is funny because there's Famicom Wars, Game Boy Wars, Super Famicom Wars, and then Game Boy Wars Advance. So there's a theme of putting the console's name in the game name.

And then on DS you get "Famicom Wars DS" so it's randomly back to Famicom.

20 years later and Motherboard is still not cured and the characters seem to have mostly stopped trying. Dr.Marbles hasn't even made an appearance in a very long time so maybe he's working on that off camera?

I noticed I was close to having seen every Cyberchase episode recently, so I just went and watched the rest instead of hoping I get the remaining ones through catching random episodes on PBS Kids. I wrote about some thoughts about the show: blog.novasquirrel.com/blog/watched...

Probably sounds more complex than it really is since it's difficult to imagine what an unfamiliar optimization would look like without seeing any code. I get the impression that the kind of stuff I described is pretty normal in 6502 code.

Had a bunch of code that tried to efficiently do some tilemap changes, including arranging the tiles to allow incrementing a register to get the next tile I'd need, and switching which register I'm using so I can get a tile I wrote a bit ago. But laying out the data and DMAing it in was smaller.

Something that happens a lot in my SNES dev stuff is that I'll start implementing the logic for something and then realize that "manually" figuring it out is going to be both slower and bigger than just using a table. Which takes some of the fun out of figuring out an efficient way to do the logic.

Sometimes with adopts I worry that I might not give the design as much love as someone else would have, but if adopts don't sell quickly then they usually just sit around indefinitely, and in that case I'm probably the only person who actually wants the design enough to buy it.

A drawing of a Furret from Pokémon, with hair on their head, pink fur, and some flower-y decorations on their fur. The "tail" part of their body is especially fluffy. They're in a pose where they're on all fours.

I recently got an adopt from @funnyhat12.bsky.social because I kept talking about how cute they were for months, and I realized that that's probably a sign I should get the adopt.

I commissioned @dranoko.bsky.social to draw them so they could have more art than just the initial reference.

Screenshot of a window, showing a list of characters the user can pick from

blog.novasquirrel.com/tilemap-town... Not a bunch of Tilemap Town updates this month, but there is a new UI for managing and creating morphs, which should help people who want to use many characters on one account. Also a few changes with self-hosting in mind, and some small fixes and improvements.

Village Village is a game without any sort of goals, much like Animal Crossing. You simply wander around a randomly generated village digging holes, planting trees and flowers, and placing decorative objects ...

I think if I did eventually do a life simulator for DS I would aim for something like petitcomputer.fandom.com/wiki/Village which I think does a good job at being elaborate enough to be fun without having a scope that's way too big for one person. I can have a go at that someday.

Kinda feel inspired to work on more DS homebrew stuff because I now have a cool thing to play it on, though that wouldn't be for a good while since I have a lot of other projects I want to do. github.com/NovaSquirrel... is so fancy presentation-wise that it had me wanting to make my own life sim.

Got my DSpico flashcart today, and I love the translucent pink shell I got it in. I have many DS flashcarts already, but it's nice to have one with better build quality than the new-old-stock stuff I had, and cool modern features. Eager to see what cool stuff results from the USB port.

What do you think XMPP is missing? When I see people talk about IRC being insufficient they talk about wanting avatars, file uploads, the ability to see messages sent while they were offline, and support for multiple devices at once, and that's all present. Seems to work okay on my phone too.

I saw someone else recommend Dino and Conversations; Dino doesn't have a Windows build yet and I've been trying Gajim, which seems to work fine, though I had some trouble with sending private messages in a multi-user chat. Conversations seems to work pretty well. I should try the web ones.

I set up an XMPP server since I want the future of chat to be federated and self-hosted, and that's the established way to do that that's been shown to scale. Pretty cool even if all I'm doing with it is lurking in tech chats, but I do think I'll want to look around and see what clients exist.