New features for Flyin’ Irons

Here is a list of the latest improvements to the game:

-  Fully functional menu system, including a new Options menu, in which players can change game options in-game! Currently, the only adjustable option is the mouse sensitivity, but this will expand in the future to include lots and lots of options.

-  New iron! The Kensworth Drake is low-powered, but its relatively light weight and low air resistance makes up for this.

- Count-up timer in Time Trial mode (replaces the static 30-second countdown timer), so you can see how your current lap is progressing as you fly.

The Kensworth Drake - third flying iron in Flyin' Irons

UnicodeEncodeError workaround

I’ve been trying to get FI running on another Windows box, so I can continue development when I don’t have access to “my” computer. Having got past the first few problems (the cerealizer thing mentioned earlier!), I ran into a rather more general problem to do with an “ascii” codec and a UnicodeEncodeError involving “ordinal not in range(128)”.

A solution, or at least a workaround, to this, is to set Python’s default encoding to UTF-8. To do this, go into python24/Lib/site.py and change line 352 from

    encoding = “ascii” # Default value set by _PyUnicode_Init()

to

    encoding = “utf-8″ # Default value set by _PyUnicode_Init()

 - this should allow Flyin’ Irons to load up properly.

Cerealizer register_alias error solution

Windows XP users have been having trouble running python setup.py build, due to the Windows version of Cerealizer not having the attribute register_alias. The problem can be solved! Here’s how:

- Download Cerealizer 0.5

- Extract the archive (use 7-Zip ) to your python folder, so there is now, for example, python24/cerealizer

- In the Command Prompt, navigate to that folder, e.g. cd\ then cd c:\python24\cerealizer

- Run python setup.py build. This will create a new directory build/Lib/cerealizer in the python24/Cerealizer folder.

- Move that build/Lib/cerealizer folder to python24/Lib/, so the path is now e.g. C:\python24\Lib\cerealizer

And that’s it! The game should now run. Let me know if this helped you!