A couple small but exciting improvements.

FRAME RATE FIX

It turns out that for certain people, the game would slow down noticeably if they turned the frame rate above a certain value (the exact rate the slowdown occurs probably depends on the monitor and graphics settings). I figured the slowdown was because I wrote the game in Python, which is not exactly a fast language.

I had also supposed that if a typical gamer turns up the frame rate and notices the game is slowed down, they'd know to turn the frame rate back down. So I didn't consider this to be a very important issue. Apparently I was wrong.

So, this week, I begrudgingly went to implement frame rate throttling to help people not play the game in slow motion. But when I did a bunch of testing, I found that the code was perfectly capable of running full speed at 120 fps even on fairly old hardware (like my old system with a non-Ryzen CPU). The slowdown was actually caused by a timing issue that caused the game to skip a vsync, resulting in up to a 50% slowdown.

The good news is, I don't have to implement throttling. But the game does now limit the actual frame rate to the monitor refresh rate. (As in, if you set the frame rate to 120 but the monitor's refresh rate is 60, game will run at 60 fps. It would be pointless for the game's frame rate to be higher than that.)

No, I did not and have no plans to make monitor refresh rate adjustable from within the game. If you find that your Ditty of Carmeana Experience is ruined by viewing it less than 120 frames per second, and your equipment supports it, there is probably a graphics driver utility that lets you override the monitor refresh rate when playing the game in full screen.

DIALOGUE UPDATES

I've updated the dialogue of one or two characters to make it easier for the player to find various things in the game.

You still have to read it though. If you just blow the dialogue this change not going to help.

A NEW APP

I added a new app to Tabitha's touchscreen. This app has no effect on gameplay but does reveal some minor trivia about how I came up with certain character and place names.

In order to obtain this app, you need to cook up the following recipe with an alchemist:

• 4 eyes of newt
  
• 2 scales of dragon
  
• 7 teeth of wolf
  
• 5 maws of shark
  
• 1 root of hemlock
  
• 5 galls of goat