I was watching a YouTube video explaining how the original DOOM fire effect works. No fancy animation. No video files. Just 37 colours, a grid of numbers and some very clever mathematics. And naturally, I thought… “Hang on. Could I do that in Visual FoxPro?” Well, apparently, yes. 😂 We’ve now got a working procedural … Read more
The extraordinary brilliance — and occasional spectacular stupidity — of AI-assisted software development. I’ve been a software developer for decades, primarily working with Visual FoxPro. Yes, Visual FoxPro. That ancient Microsoft development environment that supposedly died years ago but stubbornly refuses to go away. Recently, I’ve been using AI to help build something rather ridiculous: … Read more
Galactic Gladiators now has a music-reactive graphic equaliser in its pause menu. Yes. A pause menu. In a space game. Written in Visual FoxPro. Essential development work, obviously. We’d talked about this before. The bars were already there, bouncing around and looking rather pleased with themselves. But they weren’t actually following the music. Getting them … Read more
I’ve spent the last few weeks making a series of changes to LawnPro’s route planner. You can now choose a start point, select the calls you want to include, and set a finishing call. Behind the scenes, LawnPro uses each call’s geographic coordinates to calculate its distance as the crow flies from the start point. … Read more
Yesterday I tracked down two bugs in LawnPro’s route planner that had been bothering me for hours. The first appeared when a customer call was marked as a locked finish. Occasionally, the trip with a distance of zero failed to become the start of the route, and the route numbers ended up out of sequence. … Read more