Wonders and mysteries of the M1

I’m starting 2021 with a very nice laptop upgrade.

I made the mistake of using my 2018 MacBook Pro in the proximity of my 1½-year-old son, and amidst his toy-flinging the poor laptop’s screen got smashed. Only 80% of it works. Well, the thing was due for service anyway due its glitchy keyboard. But in a fortuitous turn of events, the new M1 MacBook Air that I ordered several weeks ago got delivered on the very same day.

It is a such a nice little computer. The M1 seems as powerful as people have been extolling and overall it feels great to use — running cool and fast. Having a physical function key row is a nice bonus. While I never hated the touch bar, it didn’t seem all that useful: what good is a small display in the keyboard that you never look at? Its value always seemed geared toward novice users who don’t know keyboard shortcuts.

Of course, getting Doomsday up and running was among the first things I did on it. I now have a native M1 build of Doomsday 3 that seems to work well enough. It took me three days after receiving the computer to resolve the immediate issues.

Continue reading Wonders and mysteries of the M1

It’s time to Talk

Things have been a little stagnant here on dengine.net for a while, so I’ve made some improvements.

The discussion forums have been migrated to a new platform. phpBB was getting really old and clunky so I made the decision to replace it with something more sleek and modern. You can find the announcement on Talk.

Another nice improvement is that the autobuilder now has a proper database stored here on dengine.net. This means that the download pages can show you the latest files instantly, and the build feed actually reflects the currently available data. The feed itself is dynamically generated from the database instead of being just a static file. Plus I’ve given the build report pages a facelift so they’re nicer to look at. Finally, all downloads are hosted primarily here on dengine.net, but they are also mirrored on SourceForge as before. The mirror download buttons can be found on the build report pages.

C-Made

I’ve been setting up CMake build files for Doomsday in the cmake-build branch. This has been quite an undertaking because Doomsday has about 50 individual components to build. (Mind you, some of those are tests and tools.) Not having done anything substantial with CMake in recent years, it was very useful to really jump into the deep end and get familiar with CMake version 3. While setting up the build for all the components on OS X, Windows, and Unix I gained a real understanding of CMake as a scripting language and now feel quite comfortable with how it operates. Continue reading C-Made