His name is Mel. As you can see, he's mostly black lab. He's quite small for a lab, though. He's nine months old (best guess) and doesn't look like he'll be getting much larger. He's got a fluffy white patch on his chest, so the rescue folks' best guess is that he's a mix of black lab and border collie or sheltie or something small and fluffy.
He's very sweet and already has a bad habit of stealing everything he thinks he can get away with.
He also does a fine job of keeping us safe from the ferocious Jurassic Armadillo that lives under our shed.
Also, big thanks to the gamedev brass for the frozen cheesecake-on-a-stick thingies. They were yum.
Duck Tiles finally split. I figured it's close enough to release to do it, as any bugs left will hopefully be trivial enough to fix through two similar code-bases. Biggest problem is that the retail version of Duck Tiles is about 3.5 meg, and that's just too big for a web-game. Also, it does a bunch of stuff like checking serial numbers and saving progress information to the registry, so a split was inevitable.
After pruning the number of musical scores from seven (in stereo) to three (in mono), ending animations from six 256x256 animations to one 128x128 animation, getting rid of the whole user-progress-tracking thing, reducing all of the bitmaps by 20% (from reducing the size from 800x600 to 640x480) and dropping the number of levels down from 216 to about 20, I've got it down to about 1.1 meg. That's still a bit heavy for a web-game, but it's not horrible. Also, I want people to get a good feel for the game as it'll play if you pay for it, and if I make things even more rudimentary (removing all music, removing more animations), then you might not want the "big version".
It's a balancing act. Hope I hit it. I'm not quite ready to post the URL for the web-game, as I want folks to be able to go to the commerce section, and that's still not ready yet.
yes, thats Labs all over, they arent so much dogs as life support systems for stomachs [grin]
We used to have one in our family and we soon discovered that food left in any way accessable would vanish in a doggy shapped blur if you werent carefull.. to this day I still remember the salad we had many years ago, my mum's chair was slightly out with a chicken leg hanging over the edge, so our dog ran, jumpped, landed on the chair and grabbed the chicken leg in one smooth motion and very quickly vanished out of the door before anyone could even blink much less yell at her, heh
I think she learnt her lesson however the day she ate two sleeping tablets, she was out of it for days after that, heh, was like having a drunk dog [LOL]