That sounds less like development hell and more like a forced hiatus! It's nice that you're still keeping busy by thinking of new ideas, however. Can't wait to see what you'll show us once you're able to continue developing the game.

I have acquired an older PC to continue development of ZeC. Unfortunately, it is quite a few years old and can not handle miniSphere. I would really like to continue the development within miniSphere but for the time being this is what I have to program with. Perhaps in time, I will be able to acquire a somewhat newer machine that will be able to handle the installation of miniSphere. Until then, I must continue with Sphere 1.5.

Quick Edit:

While I would prefer to once again be programming with miniSphere, I don't want to sound overly negative about the age of the dev machine (WinXP circa 2006-2007). I am glad to be able to be continuing programming ZeC. It has been on hiatus for quite a while now.  However, now I get to go back to programming that pesky bomb function...

The minimum requirement to run ChakraCore (the JavaScript engine miniSphere uses since 5.0) is Windows 7 SP1 so there's probably no hope of getting miniSphere to run on that machine, unfortunately.

Could this older machine perhaps run miniSphere 4.x? that should run on somewhat older machines and whilst no longer supported should be a bit better to work with than Sphere 1.5 I'd think.

@Rhuan I'm not really sure. I haven't tried to install a version of miniSphere on this machine yet. I can attempt an install and see what happens.

Update:

Attempted to install miniSphere 4.5.11 - It would seem that this machine can not handle the installation.

Tried to install miniSphere back to 4.2. Still couldn't get it to run. Sphere 1.5 it is until I can acquire a dev machine that can actually handle newer tech.

I had that issue with an older laptop as well. The machine is likely too old and doesn't like converting a 64 bit program down to a 32 bit environment, it works now ever since I got a newer laptop. But I still use 1.5, too stubborn to convert to miniSphere.

You had an excuse before as Duktape wasn't *that* much faster, but now you're missing out on blazing fast JS by sticking with 1.5

I'm old and don't like change haha, one day I'll adapt... one day...

I'm old and don't like change haha...

I am neither. I'd really like to not be stuck in the technological stone age but new tech isn't cheap.

@Miscreant Did you manage to screenshot your overworld by snapshotting your maps and resizing them? I have made something once that could do that, so I can polish it a bit if you need it.
It was based off Flik's minimap.js. Basically it loads the map, moves every sprite to -64,-64 (so they are not visible) then creates a surface which is resized and saved to disk. Stitching of the thumbnail maps is a manual labour, but by choosing a good naming scheme, could be automated.

And I too, as I use Linux, did not really migrate yet to the new MiniSphere (I use the old one instead)... But it seems there is a new Linux build, so I might be able to get it to compile again... not sure.

I'm old and don't like change haha...

I am neither. I'd really like to not be stuck in the technological stone age but new tech isn't cheap.

This is kind of curious to me, as more recent computers have been cheaper and cheaper while easily offering the basic specs that engines like miniSphere require these days. As an example, I'm getting by nicely with a refurbished (albeit fairly high-end for its time) laptop from 2012 for about 250 euros. There were options that would have worked for about 150 as well.

This is just coming from my own experience when really looking around for something half-decent when I barely had any budget myself and found something more than decent though. In all, I don't mean to pry or be rude but I figure that if you looked around enough you'd find something pretty affordable for your needs with miniSphere (and just general PC usability, naturally). I have no clue, of course, what your own situation is, what your options are, if you are in any sort of position to save up for that, et cetera.

And I too, as I use Linux, did not really migrate yet to the new MiniSphere (I use the old one instead)... But it seems there is a new Linux build, so I might be able to get it to compile again... not sure.

In my experience, it's fairly easy to compile miniSphere as long as you get the development libraries for latest Allegro/LibMNG/OGG/zlib (and I'm probably forgetting a few) from the default repository on Ubuntu at least. Certainly far from the nightmare that compiling original Sphere was.

@DaVince I think the last time FBnil was active he was using miniSphere 1.x-ish so that was definitely before I committed to supporting Linux officially.  I now do tarball releases for Linux so building there should be no issue at all these days.