Developer Notes

[Xylem]

Jim,

re: the location desciption of the Emperor Angelfish in the fishpicker;

Although not a major point, but in keeping with your established standards of Excellence, it would be grammatically correct and consistent with the other entries if the COLON (preceeding 'Red Sea') was replaced with a COMMA.

-Tom

[Jim Sachs]

Right you are. It's a semicolon, should have been a comma. Fixed.

[Jim Sachs]

Just uploaded Beta 7h:
http://www.fish-byte.com/MA3Beta.zip

Inclused a fix for non-primary monitor refreshes.

[ESHIREY]

Originally posted by Jim Sachs:

Ed - is your window spanning more than one monitor?  

Sorry it took so long to get back in here Jim. No it's not. I am just now getting the new one to see if it now works.

[ESHIREY]

I just got to try 7g and it fixed the frozen fish for me. Thank you so much.

Now for 7h

[Jim Sachs]

They don't have to be tried sequentially, you know

[ESHIREY]

Oh, I know. I just didn't want you to think I didn't appreciate your effort.

[Rick Simon]

Originally posted by Jim Sachs:

Just uploaded Beta 7h:

Included a fix for non-primary monitor refreshes.  

It took care of the problem here. As an aside, there also appears to be one other slight change. Before, the frame rates in windowed mode (without spanning multiple monitors) would stay up in the 30's on my primary monitor (ATI Radeon 9550 Primary) only. On both the 9550 Secondary display and the NVidia FX5200 tertiary display the frame rates would drop down to ~5-6fps. With the 7h beta, the frame rate stays up in the 30's on both ATI monitors and only drops on the tertiary monitor (or when spanning multiple monitors). Probably has more to do with the particular drivers in use but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

[Jim Sachs]

Thanks for the info, Rick.

[jimkraz]

I have also found that my frame rates are up in to the 50s now, were usually in the 30s. Jim

[Jim Sachs]

Just uploaded Beta 7i. http://www.fish-byte.com/MA3Beta.zip

Changes:
Fish chart in Fish Settings Dialog box will now stretch to fit the window even if the user has changed the DPI in Windows' evil DPI Settings requester.

Added a "Bubble Column" checkbox in Program settings to turn the bubble column on/off.

The program now saves the chosen Sleep() time, but it has a lower limit of 1, not -1. I didn't want it to take over the whole system if someone accidentally left it at 0 or -1.

[MadBob]

The bubble sound can be turned on with no bubbles on screen.

[Jim Sachs]

Yeah, I was debating whether to tie them together as I did in MA2. Some people use the sound to help them fall asleep, but might not want the visible column. I'm open to suggestions.

[Tarkus]

Seems silly to have sound with no bubbles. If they're trying to fall asleep, the bubbles shouldn't bother them anyway.

[StuDisney]

I was going to make the comment about the bobble sound without bobbles; but when I looked at one of me real aquariums I noticed that I here bobble noise from my filter but see no bobbles in the tank

[rps]

I'm a scuba diver, and I've always liked the bubble sound without the bubbles; when the lighting is set right, it reminds me of diving in the Bahamas in shallow (15-20ft) water.

~Ralph S.

[rps]

Here's a better argument for allowing the bubble sound without bubbles:

a) There are some (a non-zero number of) users that (for whatever reason, whether it seems silly or not) will want to have the bubble sound without the bubble column.
b) Given that the program currently allows this, it's less work for Jim to leave the capability (as is), than to get rid of it!

~Ralph S.

[Jav400]

Generally speaking I would figure that "more" options has the capabilities of satisfying more users than "less" capabilities. People that don't want the sound without the bubbles can turn it off, but people that do - have it now. Incidentally, aquariums do have the sound from the filters without always showing bubbles, so it is more "realistic" for it to be this way, for whatever thats worth.

[schneb]

Originally posted by Jim Sachs:

Some people use the sound to help them fall asleep.  

I have Tinnitus, and I agree with the above that I appreciate the control. I always do. That is one of the things I do not like about my Macintosh, lack of user-defined settings.

The latest build works fine on my WinXP at work using a dual screen ATI Fire GL card. I am getting 110fps at 1280x1024 at 32bit.

[Jim Sachs]

Just uploaded Beta 7j. http://www.fish-byte.com/MA3Beta.zip

Changes:
Removed the Titlebar auto-removal feature.
Added a Program Settings button for the Titlebar.
Added a right-click pop-up menu.
Window can now be dragged by clicking anywhere within it.
New icon experiment.

Note: This has not been tested on Vista yet.
Important note: The alternate Logo image has been renamed to AltLogo.png. If you want to replace it with your own file, that's the name which you must use. (Used to be SSLogo256d.png)