Author Archive
Get the Professional Edition of Dispatcher for Free with TrialPay
Posted by code6226 in Applications, Dispatcher on May 14th, 2010
While the Freeware Edition of Dispatcher remains completely free to use for freeware authors, you can now also get the Professional Edition for free by completing an offer with TrialPay. If you’ve been enjoying Dispatcher but didn’t want to pay the full price, why not give TrialPay a try?
New Private Alpha of Smiley Country Released: Player Fighting
Posted by code6226 in Games, Smiley Country on May 2nd, 2010
A new milestone has been reached. Thanks to features like projectiles, player health, and player states, SmileyCountry now features the basics needed for some PvP testing. As always, Puchisoft Dispatcher will automatically update Smiley Country to the newest version when you start the game.
For detailed and more frequent game updates, check out Smiley Country’s own blog.
New Dispatcher: Now with support for Czech
Posted by code6226 in Applications, Dispatcher on April 3rd, 2010
A new version of Dispatcher was just released with default support for Czech, thanks to Daniel Housa. The OK/Cancel buttons can now also be translated, and are in the 3 default languages: English, German, and Czech.
If you already have Dispatcher installed, it will of course be updated automatically. 
New Private Alpha of Smiley Country Released: Economy
Posted by code6226 in Games, Smiley Country on March 28th, 2010
When you start Smiley Country today, the Dispatcher-made Updater will get you updated to the new version automatically. The game is still in Private Alpha, but there’s still room for more testers. If you are interested, reply here.
The main new features are related to Economy and Destruction. The whole core life cycle of the game world is in now:
- Coins are now generated by each Area’s user-run City Hall… right into player’s pockets
- Construction Jobs for Buildings like Sawmills can be set (as well as setting the reward). So if you have money, and you want someone to build you a Sawmill at a certain place, you can set a Construction Job there with some coins, and the builder gets those coins when they build your Sawmill for you. Or just do it yourself.
- Buildings are built using Planks.
- Buildings can be traded with. The owner gives the building a budget and sets the Sell and Buy prices. Sawmills buy logs at the owner-set price, automatically convert these to planks at a certain rate, and then sell them back to anyone willing to pay the owner-set price.
- Anyone’s buildings can be destroyed using Clubs. These are manufactured at the Club Armory building. They are created from logs also, and break with usage. In this way it takes resources both to Build and to Destroy.
- Buildings can be Repaired using Planks also.
All the ingredients for a basic economy game are in now, so feel feel free to test away. The game is already better than it was this morning, thanks to feedback by the community. So enlist to try the game today.
New Dispatcher: Patch Mode now Free! Also, Auto-Archiving, and Full Extension Mask Support
Posted by code6226 in Applications, Dispatcher on February 7th, 2010
Very exciting news! The Freeware Edition of Dispatcher now fully includes Patch Mode. You can create as many Binary Patches, Updaters, and Installers as you want! To support this model of giving away all of Dispatcher’s key features for free, there is now a Self-Advertisement Page displayed (only) after successful updates are applied. The other editions do not have this advertisement.
Dispatcher is an amazingly easy to implement and maintain solution for releasing installers and updates to the software that you are developing. With only a few clicks, you can include an Updater with your software and create an Installer. Then, when you want to release updates, only a few more clicks are required before your users are automatically updated to your newest version.
Also exciting are the previously mentioned changes that apply to all editions of Dispatcher. Auto-Archiving means you no longer have to worry about previously released versions. Even in Patch Mode, just point Dispatcher to where the current version of your software is, and Dispatcher takes care of everything else.
Full Extension Mask Support means that Free Web Hosts are now supported no matter which Dispatcher settings you are using, even if you choose to disable Compression.
Dispatcher is now easier to use, with greater support for Free Web Hosts, and full support for making binary patches for free! Why wait? Check out Dispatcher today!
Upcoming Dispatcher Features
Posted by code6226 in Applications, Dispatcher on February 6th, 2010
A major update to Dispatcher is approaching. Here is a sneak preview of some of the features:
1) New Side-Logo
This Logo was designed by Brandon Cassata, and comes in a different color for each edition of Dispatcher. Of course, you can also pick your own Side Logo in all editions of Dispatcher.
2) Auto-Archiving for Patch Mode
Dispatcher is all about taking the work out of the distribution of initial versions and subsequent updates thereto. By answering only a few questions, Dispatcher creates installers for you, bundles an Updater with your software, and uploads new versions of your software to your website, allowing users to be updated by efficient binary patches. But to make such patches, you have to keep around old versions of your software, so Dispatcher can calculate the most efficient way to patch an old version to your new version.
Before now, you had to manually decide on an organization of where to keep your old versions. Many software developers just have a single “Release” folder with their current version, and they don’t want to have to think about any version before that one. Well, now you can stop worrying about old versions, and let Dispatcher archive your versions for you. With the Auto-Archive feature, Dispatcher will retain archive copies of previously released versions for you, so you only have to think about one version of your software: the latest!
When you want to add a new version, just click “Add Version”, and leave the path of this version’s folder the same as it was for the last version, if you want, and you’re ready to release!
3) Full Extension Mask Support
This was a feature partially added a while ago to ensure that all files that made up the update data would have a “.zip” extension, no matter what type of data it was. This way, many Free Hosts that allow direct file downloads, but not strange extensions, are pleased. Now, even if you turn off Sync Compression, all Update Data is Extension Masked.
4) ???
There is one more major change approaching, but you’ll have to stick around to find out what it is.
New Private Alpha of Smiley Country Released
Posted by code6226 in Games, Smiley Country on February 3rd, 2010
While still early in development, all testers will notice that upon running Smiley Country today, the Dispatcher-made Updater will get you updated to the new version. This is only a minor update, fixing some bugs, and changing some parameters of how the forest dynamically grows. You will notice some features partially implemented, like currency. For more details, see the Devlog.
The next major release will include some economy basics, like the creation of money, and the buying and selling to/from buildings, and of course the feature where buildings can actually do things.
If you are just installing the game for the first time starting today, you will notice that you no longer need Admin rights to Install, Update, or (as before) Play the game. This is thanks to an optional feature of Dispatcher, which causes your Installers to use a Chrome-like install method to bypass the need for Admin rights. Enjoy procrastinating!
If you want to join the private alpha, just reply to this thread.
News Now Displayed On Frontpage
If you are reading this from the frontpage, this news may not be overwhelming to you.
The news system is now working well. Friendfeed took about the whole night before it started auto-posting stories from here to Twitter, but it does work.
Enough of these news-related news stories though! The next post shall be about one of Puchisoft’s software programs. Incidentally, did you notice the quick links to them from this blog? (Look right)
Added Twitter and FriendFeed
You can now follow new happenings at Puchisoft via Twitter and Friendfeed.
Hello World!
Hey there! This is the first post of the new news system. If you are reading this in the distant future, please realize that Puchisoft had news way before this news system came out. If you want to see some, check out the Announcement forum.
My plan is to automatically spread posts I make here all over the place (RSS support is build in, so you can start adding this to your Google Reader now), with Twitter first. Then my hope is to be able to get these news stories onto the front page of Puchisoft automatically.