jonas.gaden

Attention spoiler: I sat down and designed the application flow how my app should work. Now, this was the easy part. I needed a way to model a branching phone menu system from a hand-drawn sketch, where the player navigates an automated hotline to ultimately launch an interception missile. The core abstraction i landed on was a directed graph: each GraphNode holds an audio key, a navigation mode, and a map of digit keypresses to successor node IDs. Two input modes drive all interaction — navigation, where a single keypress immediately routes to the next node, and code_entry, where digits buffer up and Space confirms, used for codes. A third mode, passthrough, handles dead-end informational nodes that auto-advance after their audio finishes with no player input required. Every node’s spoken text is defined in phoneGraphNodes.json with a stable audioKey that maps directly to an audio file, making it straightforward to record and swap voice lines independently of the graph logic.

I setup the project by creating my build chain (dyamic dev server via Bun runtime) and outlining a basic idea. Please note that the video below has been shortend in order to don’t spoil the story too much. I already implemented the Tutorial / Intro and title screen, including sound effects and animations for the intro. The game is intended to be fully immersive and lock you in for a couple of minutes. I will share more progress soon

I updated the replay mechanism, you can now press space to play again. In addition, some code clean up was done, and i noticed that the time has been tracked in two different Hackatime project (opsi). Nevertheless, here is a better explanation why I switched to Ncurses (effectivly dropping Windows support):
In the initial C++ version, rendering was a manual battle against screen flicker. You had to calculate terminal dimensions using ioctl, manually position the cursor and manage color states with ANSI codes. To prevent the screen from strobing every frame, the code relied on a custom “line-diffing” algorithm that only updated lines that had actually changed. This worked, but it was brittle. If the terminal resized or if a single character was miscounted, the entire layout would shatter. That is completely gone with the new Ncurses version.

I added the Settings app and a much wanted feature: Finally you are able to load your own background images into QuackOS. Because just pasting an img URL would be way to easy, there is more: I integrated the Pixabay API (after searching for 10 minutes straight where on earth to get the needed api key) to implement a search function which provides useful meta data and has a higher rate limit than e.g. Unsplash. As another small QoL change, I introduced a new layout for the drawing app. Whilst i am not entirely happy how it turned out, its a great improvement compared to before. Especially a few bugs were resolved, such as the app crashing when minimizing or resizing (this was due to missing guardrails allowing the canvas size to go to 0 * 0) and some weird glitches when leaving the drawing area and then coming back in.

In this latest update, I refined the dice roller by improving its layout and expanding its functionality to support up to five dice simultaneously. To enhance the visual navigation of the Games Hub, I integrated icons into the game selection window, creating a more polished experience. The most significant change involves replacing the original About Me window with a Home window, which serves as a information hub. This new interface provides users with a more detailed overview of the project, including direct access to Github and specific documentation/tutorial regarding the desktop, taskbar, and application architecture to ensure a more transparent and informative user experience when trying my project.

I added another flavour (theme) to my Mars Inc. game, in addition to technical additions and improvments.

Notable changes include, but are not limited to:

• When the stock is zero, the “Sell all”-button is now disabled
• The build cost of modules now scales with the amount of the modules: U(n) = 50 * 10^(n/2)
• Additional goods were added (Solar Panels, O2, …)
• The ability to build rockets was added and is requiring a rocket lab module
• A warehouse / storeroom module was added which increases the storage of the colony

I improved a lot, first of all the UI and the web service were improved.

• Added a racer page to view the stats of individual racers
• Added a splash screen page (if used as streaming layout)
• Added a load animation for the leaderboard

In addition, i ported the plugin to 1.21.10 / 1.21.11 which took quite some time. Some minor changes to the plugin were made, such as hidding log messages, if the waypoints are not shown.

a small demo (not from the current version) is attached below

There will be a devlog soon, which further explains how the plugin and server work

I added a GUI (which is experimental) to allow the dynamic mixing of Patterns, to create quite funny results

First version: Using structs i implemented a Pattern type, which holds a boolean map of each pixel (on, off). Then I implemented logic operator overloading and visualised the results. Turned out quite funny