poz!rk

i'm feeling luky

13 Jan'22

Sultan Solitaire and Grandfather’s Clock Solitaire

Sultan Solitaire Grandfather's Clock Solitaire
New Year brings new solitaire games: Sultan Solitaire and Grandfather’s Clock Solitaire.

By chance I was able to win Grandfather’s Clock in just 30 seconds and score 331 while recording a gameplay video.
Let’s see how long it will take other players to beat my record.

This new update is not yet available for mobile devices, but web version of All-in-One Solitaire has both games included.

15 Dec'21

Protected: Most insightful chicken on social media. Who is behind Doomberg?

With a bit of luck and a couple of hours of Internet search I've found who's hiding behind the green chicken logo and Doomberg's name on FinTwit.
The whole "investigation" was fun and quite easy to accomplish thanks to small mistake made by Doomberg.
Staying anonymous on the Internet is harder than one might think.
Anyway, I will keep this post password protected for now and see how it goes...

05 Nov'21

This is Scootterre!

Scootterre Voyageur Urban

Back in 2016/2017, I’ve spent around 5 months traveling around Asia: China, Japan, but mostly South Asia, like Thailand, Indonesia, and a bunch of other countries.
The two longest stops were the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand, where I’ve stayed for about a month, and Bali, Indonesia, where I’ve spent almost 2 months. (and did a visa run to Australia… a bad idea! 😀 )
Both islands are full of spectacular views and fun things to do, and the most popular mean of transportation on both islands is a scooter.
Read More →

08 Oct'21

Admob OpenFL extension v2

In 2015 I’ve made my first version of Admob OpenFL extension.
At that time it only supported Android, so I was happy to abandon it as soon as “official” extension with Android and iOS support became available: https://lib.haxe.org/p/extension-admob/.
Fast forward to 2021 and it was abandoned as well as no one really updated it for 4+ years…
It was working ok until recently when Apple introduced iOS14 and their App Tracking Transparency: https://developers.google.com/admob/ios/ios14?hl=en.

Well, as old saying goes: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”.
So, here is my new version of Admob OpenFL extension, that supports both Android and iOS and has lots of cool features:
https://github.com/pozirk/extension-admob

It took me around a week to make it work. While Android part was quite easy and straightforward, with iOS part I wanted to climb the walls.
Biggest issue was the speed, or rather lack of it, as I was working on iOS part in virtual machine, and it was slooooow. Any small change required me to rebuild the extension and then rebuild my project to test the change.
On virtual machine this procedure could easily take 20-25 minutes and then if I need another small change, I have to repeat everything all over again.
Anyway, extension is out there and I hope to keep it up to date!

03 Sep'21

Real price of a smartphone

My old BLU Vivo Air test phone became too old, both physically and “mentally”.
The battery is playing tricks showing 40% in one moment and then dropping to 0% another and Android version is 5.0.2, which is soon will become unsupported even by my own games.
At the moment I still set minSdkVersion to 19 (Android 4.4 KitKat), but targetSdkVersion is already forced by Google to be 30.
Btw, in OpenFL it is done in project.xml file:

<config:android minimum-sdk-version="19" target-sdk-version="30"></config:android>

A neat list of all the Android/API versions can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history.

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26 Jun'21

Gambling on interest rates… no more!

Real estate is kind of a national obsession in Canada (like everywhere else). Those, who have already bought the house, feel like they won a lottery, those who haven’t, still dreaming to win.
Both are checking prices and trends regularly.
Interest rates are as low as they can get, but prices went up a lot.
Checking from time to time what’s on sale around me, I can’t stop wondering how prices can be so high.
Anyway, I’m not writing about gambling on real estate today. 🙂
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02 Jun'21

Lady Jane Solitaire and Alhambra Solitaire, weird lags and high CPU usage

I have added 2 new games to All-in-One Solitaire (HTML5 version only for now) and the very next day started receiving complaints about the game being slow…
I have tested the game on all the computers I have, one of them is 6 years old, and the game was working as smoothly as before.
I have a feeling that the problem is because of the latest OpenFL/Lime, as it still has lots of bugs and every update is kind of a gamble, while some bugs are being fixed, others appear. 😥
Thanks to one really nice and skillful player, I came to the conclusion that the game is working slow only on computers with AMD CPU and, maybe, in Chrome browser.
None of my computers have AMD CPU, so I’m not able to 100% confirm this weird bug.
Luckily, I was able to rollback to the older version of OpenFL/Lime.
It will be challenging to release new updates though…

New games are Lady Jane Solitaire and Alhambra Solitaire.
Alhambra is a tricky one, I had to cheat a little to make a winning gameplay video. 😉
Lady Jane Solitaire Alhambra Solitaire

19 Apr'21

Cromwell Solitaire and Demons & Thieves Solitaire, plus Mahjong updates

Finally I have released updated versions of Solitaire and Mahjong games on all the platforms including iOS.
As I mentioned before, I added more layouts to Mahjong for the total of 200 layouts and added 2 more games to Solitaire: Cromwell Solitaire and Demons & Thieves Solitaire.
I must say Demons & Thieves Solitaire is a tricky one, it is not hard to win, but fairly hard to win fast.
I’m giving 11 minutes to get bonus score, but there aren’t many players who were able to get more than 728 base points so far.