Nailed it. It turns out that I was right, and somewhere along the line of installing something or another, my DLLs were in fact compromised. Since I didn’t know which C++ redistribution was the one that had been done dirty, I went ahead and uninstalled and then reinstalled all of them. That took a few minutes. What didn’t take a few minutes, was getting the Monogame Content Pipeline to import my sweet, wonderful (placeholder) art assets. I’m still not ready to say that me and the Monogame Content Pipeline are cool per se. But now I feel that I can say in a probationary fashion that maybe, just maybe, the MCP isn’t total ass. But, you know, the jury is still out.
Let’s get thee to the titles, and a bit of a “squeeee” noise. With the art installed for the Ground Objects (of which there are several) I got into the core spriteManager update code to make the little beasties update. For ground, that just means to move slowly across the ground in a right to left fashion to imply a sense of motion to an otherwise screen bound player entity. But without it, they just spawn offscreen and don’t do anything. Then I updated the Draw function inside of Core() and, there they were. My digital rolling hills were just rolling on by. I still haven’t brought all of the other functions back online, but for now the levels load and you can slowly fly over a tiled countryside.
What I hadn’t expected was how that would make me feel. There’s a lot that has happened between now and the last time I was able to fly a zeppelin over this particular country. I remember where I was when I designed these levels and what I was doing as I did. There was a time when these hills were the most important thing that I had going on. Seeing them reminded me of all those long nights, an increasingly long time ago and the love that I had put into it. Perhaps Paper Zeppelin is in the grand scheme a small thing, but those hills reminded me that small thing is mine. Soon, after I make them look to you how they look to me, you will be able to fly over them too. It’s a nice country. I think you’ll like it.