Hi all, I just wanted to give a quick update on Explorations HQ. The hurricane that hit the east coast took down the Insta-Render servers for a few days. After I had power restored my cable modem immediately fried on startup.

Since you are reading this, you probably know that everything is connected and life is almost back to normal here. (minus the obvious need for a shower, I'm good to go.)

Please download the latest version and tell your friends about this project.

Explorations Forever!

Today I have released the full suite of apps. I patched a few minor bugs in the Editor and InstaRender and created several new videos demonstrating the features. The latest videos for eMotions and Ev9.3 can be found under the "Miscellaneous Videos" section, dated 8/11/2011.

The most powerful of these enhancements would be the InstaRender batch interface embedded within the MapEditor. There are two videos showing this feature in action, and in time I will be enhancing the sprite library to support a wide variety of game styles and genres.

I also created a very nice Script As.. video to show how easy it is to ask Explorations "How To?" build objects. I hope you all enjoy these videos, things are looking better than ever.

Explorations Forever!

If good things happen in three's, then I'm hoping that idea applies to the popularity of this project. Thanks to Matt Cross aka "Uncle Fester" giving this website a serious face lift and adrenaline shot, I will be releasing the full suite of tools this week, and it's all about the 3's baby..

eMotions v3.0, InstaRender 3.0, and Explorations 9.3! Each of these marks another step to this on going journey. The new RenderServer & RegServer v3.0 is also up and running. And Explorations now has a direct connection to your licensed copy of InstaRender. Meaning you can render and import a fully animated sprite with 1 click... read more..

Explorations HQ is now powered on all new hardware, and based on user support is ready to expand as needed. We have a 2TB network drive just begging for more poser sprites and animations to access through InstaRender! (Did I mention we support unlimited rendering with monthly membership?)

eMotions v3.0 runs beautifully.. Fester also made contributions to the GUI bordering which greatly improved the asthetics of the app. (Did I mention all eMotions/Explorations games run on Linux?) ;)

We have been busy, and there is simply too much to tell. Feel free to look around..

Explorations Forever!

Over the past few days, Fester and I have be at it, testing and tweaking Explorations. While I know I promised I wasn't going to make edits to the Writer, we decided on some much needed tweaks. He will provide updates in the forums, so I know you all will be pleased.

I have made my To-Do list for the next month, and I will spend this weekend organizing the development schedule. Things are looking great!

Download Explorations Today!

I was out of town yesterday only to return to a major bug in the current package. It seems my new debugging routine was running *full* time in PlayBack and the Driver. If you run the LivePlayback and get very slow FPS (frames per second) you probably have a massive debuglog.txt file located in your \LIVE folder. Please delete the file and download the latest package.. (My Bad) :)

Explorations Forever!

This release fixes a number of minor issues within Explorations and eMotions, and puts the application on a new level of stability. I will stop all code improvements to concentrate on the Community Game project.

It is time we put this engine to work!

Explorations Forever!

I spent the past few days hunting down a very pesky bug in the Windows Heap API. After following all of Microsoft documentation, I decided that it was simply time to move away from Microsoft APIs and use the memory allocation support within PowerBASIC. So after some minor adjustments v9.2.0178 runs more stable than ever.

This release was caused by a memory leak within the Map Editor. When a sprite is selected, it will enlarge and animate to show it has the focus. Windows will start slowly chewing up memory on the Heap, as the animation runs. On my Windows 2000 Pro, system it would take about 10 hours of sitting before it would actually yield a memory error. But a memory error yielded, nonetheless.. I thought it was GDI or my graphics handles, but it traced to HeapFree() not releasing the memory.

Following the documentation, HeapFree() was working perfectly and not producing any error codes... except.. It wasn't working propery, and not producing an error code. ;) So out it went, and now the package is better than ever.

In fact, the MapEditor barely uses 15MB of memory while running. Go figure.

Download the latest..

Explorations Forever!

What can I say, I finaly got around to releasing v9.2. This version takes a major step away from Microsoft dependency. I have stripped all of the quirky Microsoft OCXs and have the entire project running on the standard COM library.

One of the final edits for this release includes the overhaul of the VB Image Loaders. v9.2 now uses 100% Free Image Library. This adds many new graphics formats and overall stability. I'm sure Uncle Fester will give this version a thorough test on Linux/WINE.