ToonTalk Enhancements and Bug Fixes

History of ToonTalk Enhancements and Bug Fixes - 1998

Here is the list of bugs and enhancements for 1998. Similar lists for 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 are available as well.

1/4/98

Made various changes to how demos are recorded. Now supports demos recorded for low and high resolution graphics that share the same subtitles, narration, and name.
1/5
Fixed another bug in replaying demos.
Fixed a bug where puzzle #48 put up a dialog box suggesting you go back 5 puzzles. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
If a bird is flying to her nest and it is in your pocket then when you stood up she froze until you sat down again.
Improved the wording of some of the puzzles between 42 and 48.
Puzzle #54 was broken.

1/7

Fixed a problem in puzzles where you saw extra copies of what you were pointing to.
Improved the appearance of the goal in puzzle #41.
Replaying demos used to turn of speech. Now it does so only if the demo has narration and the text-to-speech engine is not using DirectSound.
Sometimes when a bird removed things from her nest to put a new thing on the bottom the nest would become invisible for a short while. And the size of the new thing added to the bottom of the stack on top of the nest was the wrong size.
If a bird was delivering something to its nest which is in your pocket and you are outside, then sometimes when going inside while the bird was trying to reach you it would get stuck outside until you went out again.
If you dropped something on a box while something was in progress in falling into a hole then the drop was ignore. This was true even if you were dropping something on a different part of the box. Now only if the same hole is involved is it ignored.
If a box was moved while something was falling into a hole then that item was not displayed at the right place until the box was dropped.

1/8

If you saved just before doing the puzzle where you were supposed to use a bomb then when started again the house you needed to blow up wasn't there. Now you start again on the previous puzzle.
Sometimes while doing puzzles involving a stack of things on the nest ToonTalk got mixed up and the robot would wait even though everything was fine.
Improved how Marty responds to wrong answers for the bomb puzzle.
If during puzzles you bring a bomb back to Marty he'll now explain how bombs work.
Occasionally during puzzles a robot gets stuck on the wall -- fixed now.
If you have a nest in your pocket then sometimes while standing or sitting and a bird was flying towards you ToonTalk would behave strangely or crash.

1/9

After solving puzzle #49 ToonTalk would sometimes put up a dialog box saying you needed to go back 8 puzzles. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)

1/10

Fixed a bug where birds flying between houses would get stuck if you entered the house where it came from.
Fixed a bug replaying demos where Dusty is turned on by the right mouse button.

1/11

Fixed some problems supporting temporary users (indicated by -t 1 on the command line -- a user profile is not kept for them).
Fixed problems going from puzzle #55 to #61 (sometimes skipped to #62 and didn't save right). (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)

1/12

Demos are now interrupted by any mouse click.
Subtitles continued even if you took control of a demo.
Fixed a bug in -autodemo <n> which is for museum or store use.

1/13

Fixed a problem with the end of the new exploding houses demo in low res.

1/15

Fixed various problems that sometimes caused subtitles of demos to stay up too briefly or long.
Fixed a bug that broke the remote controls for a picture that were yes/no answers to questions.

1/16

Fixed problems with puzzle #63 and following. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)

1/19

Fixed a memory problem with the destruction of pictures that have been flipped twice.

1/20

On slow machines the subtitles appeared too early.
When running in a window (not full-screen) and moving the mouse wildly the system mistook this for a problem and offered inappropriate trouble shooting.
When tossing a picture on another picture (by holding down the control button), the picture underneath acted as if the user hit the space bar and changed appearance or color.
Fixed a fairly recent bug that broke the remote control for the looks of a picture.
If you dropped a number of the remote control for that number's looks (obtained by flipping it over) then ToonTalk crashed.

1/21

Fixed a display bug where if you pointed to a robot or truck you sometimes saw "ghosts" of old items.
Finished updating all the demos. They now work better and in both high and low resolution.
Fixed a bug that caused the system to be unstable after solving a level. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this and helping track it down.)

1/22

Sometimes after solving puzzle #61 ToonTalk would say you have to go back a puzzle and then send you forward instead. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
Sometimes when numbers and remote controls for how something looks were added then Bammer the Mouse would hit is hammer at the wrong place. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
If you dropped some text on some text and then dropped more before Bammer came then letters were lost. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)

1/23

If a demo was paused while the programmer was holding something a Java applet was generated and run.
Demo files now record which puzzle file (if any) the demo started from.
Occasionally ToonTalk generated very large <user name>.log files. These are now limited to 100 lines (except for the debugging version of ToonTalk). (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
Beta 10 released on the Internet.
A magic wand out of magic now only makes a "failure" sound if it is on the screen. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for suggesting this.)
Fixed a bug in saving a room to the clipboard via F6 (used in making puzzles).
Puzzle #16 had a text pad with A on it on the side for no reason.
Puzzle #5 had Dusty underneath some junk.

1/26

Fixed a bug that caused the 16-bit version to stop replaying a demo if flying above a city with trucks driving around. (This broke the exploding houses demo.)

1/27

Fixed the low resolution version of part 2 of the Ping Pong demo.
1/28
Demos now run in a window if a user has chosen that option in "Set Options".
If you use "Set Options" to indicate "museum mode" then it takes effect immediately (rather than the way it was which was next time you start ToonTalk).
Changed the Swedish version so it runs older versions of the demos which have synchronized narration.

1/29

Removed the minimize and maximize buttons from the dialog asking your name. (Thanks to Oliver Gerards for pointing this out.)
Shrunk the size of the "Loading from CDROM" message (thanks to a suggestion from Shelly C. Wallace).
Used to be that if you held down space then the system autorepeat would cause ToonTalk to act like you pressed it multiple times. No longer. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
Running a demo no longer changes the default name in the dialog that asks your name. (Thanks to Oliver Gerards for pointing this out.)
If you picked up a box inside of a box, stood up, sat down, and dropped something into the inner box the system crashed.

1/30

Fixed a problem with remote controls of the appearance of a number where the width the number would change rapidly if the number changed its number of digits.
Fixed a problem where if you typed to a number with robots on the back, the number wouldn't look like it changed until you picked it up.
The 16-bit version can now be exited by typing Alt-F4.
Fixed a bug that broke puzzle #64 and a few afterwards.
Fixed a bug where certain kinds of pictures ended up at the wrong place on the floor after saving and restoring a city.
Fixed a bug where sometimes if you come back to doing puzzles after having done free play something that was supposed to be in your hand wasn't.
If you saved a room (say to make a puzzle) then sometimes when the room was restored things that were on top of other things were now underneath.
(This caused puzzle #5 to be solvable without using Dusty as intended.)
In puzzle mode (but not free play) it was possible to lose something just off the edge of the screen. Your hand can now reach further in all four directions.
If Pumpy is used to make something a good size ('G') then you sometimes got the wrong sound effect and it would happen instantly rather than be animated.
If you were running the 16 bit version in full-screen mode and some other program got the focus (e.g. you typed Alt-Tab) then when ToonTalk was resumed it was in a Window rather than full-screen.
Sometimes boxes with lots of holes had very narrow see through gaps.

1/31

Numbers no longer act like they are selected when first typed to. They now behave like text pads do to typing.
If a puzzle had a robot with a training counter then used to be after it went to zero you could still training it to do more if you quickly did another action.
The display of the number of steps left for training a robot in puzzle mode improved.
Pressing F1 while walking outside will now call for the helicopter (as well as 'h' and 'H' as before).
Sometimes when training a robot to give a bird something the bird would fly off with the item but drop it in view (if the item was wide enough).
If you try to pick up a tool that a robot is holding you know grasp the robot.
The placement of solutions was wrong for user defined puzzles.
The geometry of things put on the wall using the wall decoration remote was broken.
The "Back" button on "Set Options" did work on the last page (unless more than 1 language version was installed). (Thanks to Oliver Gerards for pointing this out.)
Fixed a problem where Marty showed www.toontalk and left off the .com part. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
If you walk into the house after solving the last puzzle it now says "Thanks". (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting the old behavior.)
If you paused a demo and then it lost focus (e.g. a screen saver started running) then ToonTalk would iconize which is OK but it wouldn't start again. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
Puzzle #48 had a recently introduced bug so that the timer remote showed "no". (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)

2/1

If you quit on the first puzzle or on the first two robot puzzles you are now offered to see hint files.
If you paused while holding a scale, ToonTalk used to try to generate a Java applet of the scale.
Improved the appearance of number and text pads by halving the darker colored part between characters.
If you create something with user pictures and then generate a Java applet if a file of the same name but which is a GIF file rather than a BMP file exists on the Java subdirectory then it'll be used instead.
This fixes the problem that applets can't deal with BMP files (while Java applications can).
Similarly user sounds used in Java applets will use AU rather than WAV files if found.

2/3

In puzzle mode sometimes when a robot failed it would make a failing noise even when you were outside. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
Java applets were no longer making sound effects.
User defined sound effects sometimes caused the system to crash.
The label on the roof, house, and wall decorations in the sensor notebook were wrong.

2/4

Fixed problems with pausing and resuming ToonTalk. (When Windows has more than 256 colors and the 16-bit version and interactions with screen-savers.)
16 bit version showing a demo in full-screen when interrupted by another program (or Alt-Tab) then when resumed was no longer full-screen.
Interrupting a demo and then resuming made the mouse cursor visible.

2/5

16 bit version looked terrible when power was turned off (F8) and running with Windows with other than 256 colors.
16 bit version would try to read from the CDROM even if everything was installed on hard drive.
Both versions tried to read from CDROM to try to run a demo that didn't exist.
Start ToonTalk displayed the buttons in an ugly manner when Windows was running in with large fonts.
If you haven't used ToonTalk for a while you got an offer to reset Marty's user model even if you were just playing the puzzle game.

2/6

Sometimes when restarting a puzzle (with a bomb) you lost what was in your hand.
Sometimes inside the rocket a solution was posted over the door rather than in a good slot.
In the alarm clock puzzle if you brought any empty nest but then the bird never delivered the nest was posted on the wall anyway.
Fixed the placement of Dusty in puzzle 64 (was very near the top). (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
Sometimes a robot would wait on box just off the top of the screen. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.)
Marty would crash trying to describe something it knew nothing about. Now he says nothing.

2/23

Fixed a recently introduced bug (on 1/31) where if you ran a puzzle where a robot started off holding a wand then it needed to be holding the wand at the end of training. (Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace and Marc for reporting this.)
Provided support for -language British (including proper handling of large numbers and speaking them).
Released Beta 10A on the Internet.

2/24

Sometimes when ToonTalk is showing a dialog box, ToonTalk would get restarted and cause confusion: mouse hidden, blank window shown, dialog box buried sometimes.
2/27
Sometimes when trouble shooting was turn off (via Set Options), then the ToonTalk window would minimize and restore itself automatically.
You now receive force feedback if you are using a force feedback joystick compatible with Microsoft DirectX 5.
Sometimes when a robot that wasn't being watched picked a place to put something on the floor, he put it on the wall by mistake.
If you quit doing puzzles while on the first one or the first 2 robot puzzles then even in free play ToonTalk put up a dialog box offering hints.

2/28

When the trial version of ToonTalk has less than 14 days left sometimes you would get the message box warning you more than once.

3/2

Added remote controls for making and modifying force feedback effects.

3/3

Fixed a problem pausing a demo by hitting any key.
3/5
The 16-bit version would when run after crashing offer twice to give trouble-shooting help.
If running with options like 2, 3, or 4 times smallest window size then sometimes when pausing or quitting the desktop needed to be repainted.

3/6

Fixed a problem with large windows with the 16-bit version that the mouse couldn't move left.
Fixed a problem with large windows that sometimes caused it to be interrupted by normal mouse clicks.
Fixed a bug in the interface to the HyperBot Controller.

3/12

Finished adding a way to create and load extensions to ToonTalk as dynamic linked libraries (DLLs).
If something was on a nest and then the floor was saved the size of the item was wrong when restarting.

3/13

Fixed a problem where Marty wouldn't say much when you went back to a city that you saved while on the floor.
Fixed another problem where after a while Marty would stop talking.

3/17

Made several improvements in the new extension facility. (See extend.htm).
Fixed a bug in puzzle #5.
Fixed several minor geometry problems with boxes.
You can no longer lose your hand off the sides while doing puzzles or training robots.

3/18

Fixed a problem with the Fibonacci demo (introduced on 2/27).
Subtitles did not stay up the proper amount of time if ToonTalk's speed was other than 100. (Only influenced the Fibonacci demo.)
If Set Options was set for users who were beginners and ToonTalk terminated due to trial over or bad installation then it just exited. Now you get a dialog.

3/20

On start up ToonTalk filled the entire screen with a white window for a few seconds. No longer.
Sometimes even if you specified to you wanted to run in a small window you got a big one.
You know see an hour glass cursor while waiting for ToonTalk to load.
If running with a large window (but not full-screen mode), then if you exited with Alt-F4 it left parts of the screen un-refreshed.
You now get trouble-shooting help if try to use an extension that has not been installed.

3/23

The warning for trouble shooting joystick calibration would cause ToonTalk to pause and resume when flying to the edge of the city.
Sometimes ToonTalk started up without acquiring the mouse so that mouse movement was ignored until ToonTalk was paused and resumed.
Added a force effect to puzzle game if you try to enter the house without having been in the rocket.
System generated notebooks now have text pads with invisible pads (i.e. just the text shows) since this looks nicer.

3/25

Fixed problems where during puzzles or training robots you drop something off screen and lose the item or the robot/hand.
Fixed a performance problem if many numbers are being created without being watched.
Fixed a performance problem with large boxes (100s or 1000s of elements).
Fixed several small memory leaks while doing puzzles.
Fixed a bug that can crash the system during puzzles 24, 33, 38, 39, and 53.
Changed the way new line and carriage return work in text pads so they work better when written to a file or put in the clipboard.

3/26

Fixed a memory leak when putting pictures into a notebook if the pictures had been flipped over.
Sometimes the system would generate warnings on start up that would end up spoken by Marty during credits. A message box is now used.
Fixed a memory leak associated with the collision remote control/sensor.
Released Beta 11

3/27

You can no longer use remote controls to set an object's width or height negative.

3/29

Fixed some bugs that sometimes broke the system while doing puzzles involving sensors.
Fixed a performance bug related to sensors that have been made blank.
Fixed a bug that sometimes happened if you ran Dusty in "erase" mode for a very long time over stuff.

3/30

A few puzzles, if restarted by setting off the bomb, restored the house without all the things needed on the floor.

3/31

Improved the timing of subtitles and introduced a toontalk.ini Switch "SubtitlesSpeed" which controls the speed. 100 is normal.
Introduced another toontalk.ini Switch "MaximumNumberOfHoles" which controls the maximum number of holes a box can have. 2,048 is the default.

4/1

Fixed another problem with sensors and bombs going off.
Fixed a geometry problem in puzzle #72.
Fixed a bug with bombs going off in a puzzle while Bammer the Mouse is about to smash something.

4/2

Fixed a bug when a house was blown up while doing puzzles while a bird had temporarily removed stuff from her nest to put new stuff on it.

4/3

Fixed a colour palette problem when running on a display using more than 256 colors and you are not asked for your name (e.g. when running a demo).

4/8

Installation from CDROM to a machine without a web browser didn't completely install things if user chose to install Internet Explorer.

4/9

The text-to-speech engine is not set at maximum volume. Previously on some systems it was barely audible.
Sometimes when you take things out of the notebook (like trucks) then the stuff inside became invisible.
The new handling of multi-line text broke the random sentence maker examples.
Fixed internal bookkeeping problem when sitting down while a robot is about to pick up something.
Fixed a display bug where sometimes you see parts of where an object was for a few seconds. (This occurred only when subtitles were visible.)

4/10

Fixed a bug in the display of drop feedback on boxes (just the appropriate part of the box wiggles).
During the puzzle game robots did not clean up after themselves as they do in free play. Thanks to Shelly Wallace for reporting this.
If you took a remote control for the looks of something into another house and robots were dropping things on the original, then you could hear the mouse's hammer and it was slow.
If you dropped something on a text pad and then dropped something else before the mouse came you got an empty text pad. Thanks to Shelly Wallace for reporting this.
The puzzle about binary numbers now uses commas (for the American version) to separate every 3 digits. This way the number pad matches the picture on the wall and Marty's talk balloon. Thanks to Shelly Wallace for reporting this.

4/11

Fixed problems with the remote control for looks not working right if in a different house from its "controlee".

4/12

Discovered a bug in the Microsoft Visual C++ ifstream class library which caused Marty to give very little advice during Free Play in the 32-bit version. (Switched back to Borland C++ for now.)
Redid the low-resolution version of the bank account demo.

4/14

Released Beta 11A
Added 2 buttons to the "choose demo" screen: Help and Set Options. Like the previous screen.
If a language was specified using -language name then trailing spaces sometimes confused it.

4/15

Fixed an installation bug in the 32-bit upgrade where Set Options didn't know that it had been installed.
Finished generating a British version of ToonTalk -- with different narration, spelling, printing and speaking numbers, and the like.
Fixed a bug with trouble shooting certain problems like un-installed file extensions.
Fixed the problem that the low resolution version of the Swap demo ran in high resolution in 32-bit version.

4/28

Improved the description of puzzle 42. (Thanks to Ivan Filippenko for pointing out this out.)
Fixed a sentence in the final hint of puzzle 32. Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for pointing this out.

4/29

British version no longer says "Howdy".
Fixed a bug where if a robot started off with a tool (as in many puzzles) and set it down and then picked it up he got a new version of the tool. And if a wand then copy counter was gone.
If you closed the dialog box asking for your name then sometimes the next time you ran ToonTalk it offered trouble shooting advice claiming incorrectly that ToonTalk didn't terminate properly last time. Thanks to Shelley Wallace for help with this.
In the UK version Marty said numbers incorrectly if they contained commas.
In the UK version commas are now optional in numbers that are coming from the clipboard to become a number pad.
Puzzle 19 was broken in languages that don't have commas inside of large numbers.
UK puzzles no longer have numbers with commas in them.

4/30

Cleaned up the second splash screen (where Marty says the credits) and some of the images when the helicopter is landing.
If you dropped a box on a blank number pad, the pad correctly changed to the number of holes of the box. Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for reporting this. Also the blank number became non-blank before the mouse smashed it.
If you trained a robot to drop something on a blank box, the robot got confused. Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for reporting this.
If you trained a robot to push buttons of a tool, the robot got confused. Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for reporting this.
If you dropped a text pad on a notebook, sometimes it would not go to a matching page. Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for reporting this.
There was no drop feedback if something was attached to the wand.
Made several improvements to drop feedback.
Occasionally you could copy something with a wand and then it went other items on the floor when moved around while still attached to wand.

5/1

You can now drop numbers on remote controls that have a list of values (e.g. "yes" and "no" or "see some", "see all", and "see nothing").
UK version was adding spurious warnings about missing strings to log files.
If while a bird was moving the stack of things off her nest to put a new item on the bottom, you grabbed the item, or stack, or the nest confusion could follow. No longer grabable while bird is moving things around.
If while Marty was speaking and using talk balloons you pressed PageDown many times, Marty would sometimes show an empty balloon for a while. Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for reporting this.
Start ToonTalk now has a button for an "about" box (to keep lawyers happy).
When you pause ToonTalk while Marty is speaking, he know stops mid-sentence. Narration too.
UK CDROM version read from CDROM even when it didn't need to.
If you double click on a USR file, you now get a choice of Free Play, Game, or Demos. Previously jumped to Free Play.

5/3

Made the text for puzzle #8 less ambiguous.
If you try to train a robot to give a box to another robot, Marty said you can't train a robot to train a robot. Now if that robot is already trained, Marty says you can't train a robot to give a box to a robot.

5/5

Fixed a bug that sometimes crashed the system when flipping through the sensor notebook.
Vacuuming up and then spitting out a picture broke remote controls for the picture.
The remote control for showing what a picture is colliding with didn't work for user defined pictures.

5/11

UK version now speaks numbers correctly.
Fixed a bug where a saved city sometimes lost the connection between a sensor and a picture.
If you called for a tool (e.g. F2 for Dusty) and then picked up something before Dusty jumped into your hand, Dusty got confused.
If you trained a robot on a box containing the sensor for "who is colliding" with a picture, then the thought bubble was wrong and matching didn't work right.
Trial version no longer lets you save notebooks or cities. Sorry.
Fixed a bug in generating Java code dealing with user provided images or sounds.

5/12

UK version had a bug speaking numbers with commas in them.
Puzzle 31 now asks for day followed by month except for the US version.

5/13

Sometimes when certain items (like nests and scales) in boxes became very small, then when the box became big the items were so small they couldn't be seen. (But they could be picked up.) Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for helping track this down.
If a picture on a picture became very small and then was copied the geometry was lost and sometimes the pictures on the pictures became too small to see. Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for helping track this down.

5/14

Fixed a bug introduced on May 5, which causes the system to crash if a collision detector is used while something is destroyed (e.g. dropped in the notebook). Ping Pong Act 2 demo crashed.
When you copied something that was a part of something, the copy sometimes had an odd size. Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for pointing this out.
Fixed a bug in puzzles where sometimes a robot's wand got a very strange size.
If during the puzzle game, you stand up while a robot is working, then Dusty did not appear if needed.
If during the puzzle game, a robot fails and there is another team member behind him, then Dusty appeared even if not needed.
If during the puzzle game and Dusty is running to your hand, then Dusty now stops if you pick up something before he jumps in your hand.
Fixed a recently introduced bug where if a bird while a bird in another house adds something to the stack of stuff on her nest, that the item appears in house you are in.
Marty sometimes with text-to-speech would only say the part of a sentence after a comma.
Marty would leave while saying "bye" or "so long" and it would be cut off.
Marty sometimes would say "hello" at inappropriate times.
Closing the dialog box that asks if you want to continue, come back later, etc. now acts just like choosing continue.

5/15

A tottering scale now matches a tottering scale. Thanks to Jeroen van Hilst for pointing this out.
Bammer the Mouse now joins boxes together -- previously they just clicked together instantly. Thanks to the folk at the Institute of Education at the University of London for suggesting this.
If a robot was trained to make a team out of other robots it got confused.
If a robot was trained to put a box into the thought bubble of another trained robot, he got confused.
If a trained robot's box was removed from his thought bubble then that robot was not saved correctly (in the notebook or a city).
Bammer the Mouse now joins robots together to make teams. Thanks to the folk at the Institute of Education at the University of London for suggesting this.
On the first puzzle on a level the sound for having a good solution wasn't played even if it was the first puzzle solved in the session. Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for pointing this out.

5/18

If Dusty or Pumpy was running into your hand while you stood up then when you sat down, he looked funny in your hand until you dropped him.
If a bird was delivering something to a nest and a robot was removing things from the nest and you were watching standing up then sometimes ToonTalk crashed. Sometimes this happened in puzzle #48. Thanks to Sven Huberti for reporting this.
If you pick up something before Bammer the Mouse smashes it then both items move together until smashed together.
Sometimes after Marty gave the final hint for a puzzle, if you came back to him he would present an empty talk balloon.
Sometimes things didn't quite fix in a boxes hole -- but where a little bit too big or small. Thanks to Shelly C. Wallace for pointing this out.
If a robot was trained to have Dusty spit something out, then it got confused when you tried to pick up the thing spit out.
If a robot was trained to use Dusty and left stuff on the floor and left Dusty in reverse or "erase" mode then the robot was confused when run.
If a robot was trained to flip a picture over the geometry of the flipped picture was that of the other side.

5/19

If a robot was trained to use Dusty, set him down, and then use him again the second time Dusty was too big and not positioned right.
You can now add a bird to the back of a picture. This is useful in conjunction with the sensor which shows who you are colliding with. You can vacuum off the picture from the sensor, flip it over, get the bird, and give it a message. This is great for advanced game and simulation programming.

5/21

Marty can now talk about robots that are trained to manipulate the thought bubbles of other robots.
If you were holding a robot over another robot and then call for Marty, he used to describe the robot underneath -- not the one you are holding.
Sometimes while Marty is talking and you send him away (with F1), he displays some old thing he had said for a few seconds before leaving.
If you saved a city with a bird or nest whose other part was in Dusty the vacuum, then when loading the city the bird or nest was created with unknown counterparts. They now create the missing part when released.
If you dropped anything other than a text or number pad on a blank box, Marty repeatedly gave a somewhat inappropriate warning.
Blank robots are now supported. Good for putting in boxes in thought bubbles.
If you drop a team of robots on a blank number pad, it now gets the number of robots in the team.
If you drop a team of robots on a blank box, it now gets one robot per hole.

5/22

In the UK version, Marty had troubles describing which special keys (like rubout) are pressed by a robot.
In the UK version, Marty had troubles saying "backspace" (not says "backspace key" and all is well).
Marty sometimes said things like "And then pick up a text." now says "And then pick up a text pad."
Sometimes if Marty teleports in when the last place he was has blown up the system crashed.

5/23

The recursive factorial sample program was broken (see doc/English/programs.htm). The doubly recursive factorial has yet to be fixed but a work around in now documented in the dfact.tt file. Thanks to Carl R. Witty for reporting this problem.
Took away the "quit" button on the "choose demo" screen. (Made it too long for 640x480 screens with task bar.)
If you trained a robot to set off a bomb and then run that robot on the back of a picture that you are holding, sometimes ToonTalk would crash. Thanks to Carl R. Witty for reporting this problem.
Released Beta 12 on the Internet.

5/24

If you saved a city while a picture was flipped over, then when you restored the city the picture's notebook was no longer connected to the picture.

5/26

If you dropped a number on a blank number it sometimes added and sometimes the blank number got the value of the one on top. Now it always gets the value on top.
If you dropped a text pad on a blank text pad, the blank text pad would turn non-blank a second before getting the value of the other.
If you dropped a text pad on a blank text pad, the text pad on top was destroyed after being smashed. But that wasn't consistent with other uses of blank items underneath.
Sometimes Bammer the Mouse would wait 1 second before starting to run out.
Robots sometimes got confused when trained to drop things on blank things.

5/27

Sometimes when a bird was adding things to a nest while a robot was removing things, ToonTalk crashed. Thanks to Sven Huberti for reporting this problem.
Sometimes if you pick something up just before a robot was about to then ToonTalk got mixed up. Thanks to Sven Huberti for reporting this problem.
Some puzzles Marty would say "we need a number greater than X" when he should have been saying "we need a number less than Y".
If you saved in a notebook a nest with many thousands of items, it was not always saved correctly. Now the limit is 1000 items. Thanks to Kevin O'Brien for reporting this.
If you saved something in a notebook that took over 30,000 bytes to encode there were problems. Now the limit is 64K and it recovers better when the limit is exceeded. Thanks to Kevin O'Brien for reporting this.
If you took out options like ToonTalk's speed, or Marty's letter size, or Marty's talking speed and tried to rub them out to type a new value they would not accept 0 as a value but would jump to 100. Thanks to Benedikt Schmitt for reporting this.
Very large and zero size values of ToonTalk's speed, or Marty's letter size, or Marty's talking speed now work better.
If you finished all the puzzles and then restart ToonTalk, then it asks you if you want to redo all the puzzles. If you said yes it got confused. Thanks to David Kahn for discovering this.
If an anomaly repeatedly happened before ToonTalk was initialized then you got repeated message boxes about it. Now the limit is 4.

5/28

Marty says "+, -, or space bar" as "plus or space bar". Now he says "'+', '-', or space bar" and reads it as "plus minus or space bar".
If you drop a sensor with a picture on it on a blank picture the blank picture gets the appearance of the remote control (but isn't active). This is like dropping a numerical sensor on a zero.
Overhauled some of the error reporting. Some errors would cause Marty to appear but he would spell the message since he couldn't say the words.
If anything important is in the user log and the user has indicated in the "Set Options" that they are "knowledgeable users" then when they quit a dialog box appears offering to show them the log.
Fixed a problem when saving a city where some things got lost (e.g. sometimes when a picture was flipped over when saved).
Fixed a problem trying to read non-existent files when compiled with Microsoft VC++.
Fixed a problem that prevented offering help when quitting on the first puzzle or first robot puzzle.

5/29

Fixed a problem where sometimes the message saying that the beta or trial version has expired didn't appear.

6/1

Fixed a few problems with trouble shooting dialogs not appearing.
The new dialog offering to show user their log file was sometimes buried under other windows.
Marty had problems talking about variable width text pads (used for labels in notebooks).
Fixed a problem where a box held by a robot kept getting wider.

6/3

You can now re-train robots. If you vacuum out the box from a robot's thought bubble and give a box to the robot you'll re-enter his thoughts. He'll do what he was trained to do until you press a mouse or keyboard button.
Fixed a problem where sometimes a nest was shared across loads from multiple files or notebooks.
Marty used to say "0." as "zero point".
Fixed a problem in the UK and Swedish version where "1, 2, 3," was said wrong.
Sometimes the dialog box offering to show log file appeared even if Set Options was used to select inexperienced users who shouldn't be bothered.

6/4

If you selected the option that Marty shouldn't speak and that text balloons should stay up until you click, they zoomed by very quickly.
Fixed a recently introduced bug that interfered with the Fibonacci demo.
Trial version didn't put up box saying that it will expire in n days.
Trial version put up a dialog box when you tried to save something in your notebook but it was sometimes buried under other windows.
The variable width text pads (used in labels in the notebook) did not respond to the remote controls for "see some" vs. "see all" and for text color.

6/5

The ToonTalk memory cache had a maximum size of 25% of physical memory. It now is 25% of the smaller of physical memory and available virtual memory.
If toontalk.ini has an entry DefaultUser=X then new users will get the default city, notebook, and tool layout of user X. (Wasn't documented and city aspect not implemented previously.)
Occasionally the system crashed after sitting down after having stood up from the grass.
Saving a city when sitting on the ground produced a city that couldn't be loaded properly.
Remote controls for decorating the room, house, or roof behaved badly if you are on the ground.

6/6

Fixed a memory leak when the vacuum was used while training a robot.
Fixed a memory leak when a robot was trained to give a bird something.

6/7

Due to a fix on 6/4 when a t-shirt of a bird was text it had a white background.
You couldn't return a picture to a stack by dropping it on the stack.
Sometimes when something was selected, some part of it would get a white border around it.
Fixed a problem where Marty would cause very long delays in describing some foreign birds.
Fixed a problem where Marty would repeat himself after describing a foreign bird.
If there was an error loading a city, then the message appeared in the credits.
If there was an error creating a foreign bird while loading a city, then text-to-speech was turned off.

6/8

Fixed 2 minor memory leaks in the puzzle game.

6/9

The AutoPlay program on the CDROM mistakenly thought ToonTalk was not installed when it had been installed with the "Compact" option.
Marty would sometimes when saying lots of things, cut a sentence short (start next sentence after 2 seconds).

6/10

Sometimes the system mouse cursor would be visible while ToonTalk was running.
Fixed bugs in retraining a robot to return things to a stack.
Fixed a problem retraining a robot to add a label to a box.
Sometimes if a bird was returning to a house that has been blown up the system crashed.
Fixed bugs in retraining a robot to drop things in a truck.
Fixed bugs in retraining a robot to give things to a bird.
Fixed bugs in retraining a robot to find things in notebooks.
Sometimes quitting ToonTalk while training a robot crashed the system.
Fixed a memory leak when dealing with old robots (created before they had serial numbers). Also serial numbers were generated incorrectly for old robots.
Sometimes a robot trained to take something from a notebook, when running would take a page from the opposite side of the book.
Robots being retrained who dropped things on a notebook got confused.
Sometimes if a robot is being trained to use the vacuum, it crashed when you were finished training him.

6/11

Fixed the sample programs primes.tt and dfact.tt (available from programs.htm).
The factorial demo's narration stopped in the middle of the last sentence. (Thanks to Shelly Wallace for pointing this out.)
The factorial demo's last sentence had the subtitles stay up much too briefly. Still goes away before sentence is over. (Thanks to Shelly Wallace for pointing this out.)

6/12

Fixed a recently introduced bug where in puzzles the connection between birds and nests was broken. So nests had eggs in them. (Thanks to Shelly Wallace for pointing this out.)
Fixed many bugs in retraining robots within puzzles.
After each retraining a robot got taller and thinner. No longer.
Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the system to crash during shut down while retraining.
If you blew up the wrong house in puzzle 49, then you found a very large number in your hand when you re-entered the house. (Thanks to Shelly Wallace for reporting this.)
Puzzle 49 (the one that introduces bombs) no longer posts anything when you blow up the other house. (Thanks to Shelly Wallace for pointing this out.)
Fixed a problem with the autoplay executables (clickme.exe and just32.exe) had launching ToonTalk when ToonTalk has been un-installed. Now offers to re-install instead.
If text-to-speech was installed but narrations were not then demos had speech which sometimes made them terminate early.
Some exceptional conditions displayed dialog boxes that on the 16-bit version and a 640x480 were partly off the screen.
If running the 32-bit version with an 8-bit sound card, then the text-to-speech engine fails to start. It now offers trouble shooting advice for how to fix this.
If you flipped over a picture with a picture on top you got a confusing warning from Marty and the remote control notebook wasn't quite right.
If you dropped a picture on a picture then it was displayed clipped to the region of the picture underneath before Bammer smashed it.
If you move the ToonTalk window (not running full-screen) it now displays properly. You can also re-shape the Window. Alt-space puts up the menu.

6/13

When you flip over a picture with a picture on top, the end of the notebook of remote controls has a notebook for each "sub-picture". If you took one of those notebooks and dropped it back where it came from ToonTalk crashed.
Sometimes the notebooks at the end of the remote control notebook was missing the last ordinary remote control and label. This also confused the sub-picture notebooks.

6/14

If a picture had multiple things moving on top of it and some of those pictures had parts as well, then sometimes pictures would slide between another picture and its parts.
If a picture was moving slowly on another picture then pointing to the picture or making it move on the floor made the moving picture stop due to round off errors. The fix for this means that pictures several times larger than the screen might look wrong.
Sometimes when Marty was describing a remote control for the looks of something else, he started speaking nonsense.

6/15

Occasionally notebooks containing robots (and that weren't open to page 1) when saved in the main notebook, caused the system the crash when they were reconstructed next time. (Thanks to Kevin O'Brien for his help tracking this down.)
Fixed a bug in the generation of comments in Java code for describing what had just been constructed.
Generation of Java code was sometimes broken when birds and nests were involved. (E.g. Ping Pong game didn't translate right.)
If power is off (e.g. via F8) then flipping a picture with robots on the back over and then over again started the robots running.
Improved the geometry of large boxes where sometimes the contents weren't displayed at quite the right place.
Changed puzzle 31 so Marty says "Try to make a box with your birthday in it." rather than "Trying making a box with your birthday in it."

6/16

Re-did the end of the Ping Pong demos (parts 2 and 3).
Fixed a problem saving robots if they have been taken out of a notebook that is in the main notebook.

6/17

Fixed a problem with robots on the back of pictures that are on the back of other pictures.
You used to see birds fly out of a picture to another spot on the back of a picture if you dropped the picture in a box.
Fixed a problem dropping pictures with robots on the back on the clipboard -- sometimes it was unnecessarily too large to save.
The largest encoding for saving an object on the clipboard is doubled. (64K before custom uuencoding).
The debugging version gave a spurious warning if you pressed Esc during the titles.
Removed the faulty dizzy sample program from programs.htm and javademo.htm, and replaced it with nicer movies program.

7/4

Fixed a bug in the Swedish version that confused numbers and text in some puzzles (including #2).

7/6

If text-to-speech was not installed, then the 32-bit version reported problems starting text-to-speech in the log.
16 bit Beta 13 released to the Internet.
Remote controls whose appearance is non-numerical sometimes had a display bug where the remote would drift around.
32 bit Beta 13 released to the Internet.

7/7

Fixed 2 bugs when generating a Java applet of a ToonTalk picture that is or contains a picture of the programmer walking wearing a hat. Yes, the bugs were that specific.

7/9

Sometimes when running with Windows more than 256 colors when ToonTalk terminated it left Direct Draw is an inconsistent state so you needed to restart the computer to run ToonTalk again.
Fixed a problem on some web browsers running ToonTalk's Java demos.
Revised puzzles 47 and 48 so they work fine if a correct but unexpected solution was presented in puzzle 43.
Fixed a problem saving to the clipboard the contents of the floor of a room (via F6) where birds and nests lost their connection.
Fixed a problem with the US version that it warned that narration wasn't installed when it was.

7/10

Fixed a bug in describing robots in notebooks. This also occurred in some situations when generating Java applets.
Fixed a bug in producing Java applets where a robot used a vacuum in reverse.
Revised the internal working of the sensor which shows who you are colliding with so that if the "collidee" has stuff on the back it is not copied until the picture is vacuumed off the sensor.
If you walked out during the alarm clock puzzle (#54), the system would crash. Thanks to Tyler Breisacher for reporting this and helping to track it down.

7/11

Fixed a bug showing trouble shooting help when the text-to-speech engine wouldn't initialize properly.
Fixed a bug in generating Java for a robot that vacuums something off of a sensor with a picture on it (e.g. "colliding with who").
Can now generate Java for a robot that flips over pictures and takes a bird off the back. (Important when used with "colliding with who").
Colliding with who now translates to Java so that you can take off the "collidee" and flip it over.

7/12

If you pressed Escape while retraining a robot, then the training stopped. Now just the retraining. You need to press Escape twice to stop both.
If you were training a robot with an initial tool (like the wand in many of the puzzles) and you left junk on the floor, then the robot would automatically add to his training the vacuuming of stuff left behind but would forget about the initial tool. Thanks to Tyler Breisacher for helping to track this down.

7/13

If while running a demo and the power saving feature (at least of Windows 98) shut down power to the display, then when resumed it stopped with DirectDraw errors.

7/14

If you start ToonTalk with a different user name, while another ToonTalk was running (but iconized) then ToonTalk thought you needed trouble shooting for a previous crash.
If you typed Alt-F4 during some puzzles, then the 32-bit version of ToonTalk would sometimes put up a DirectX error message and quit. (Pause then Quit worked fine.)

7/17

Released Beta 13A on the Internet.
If you took control of some demos then the geometry of things were broken until they were resized.

7/21

Fixed a bug when typing Alt-F4 to the opening screen.
On some machines when Marty was speaking without speech bubbles, he would repeat himself over and over again.

7/29

If you double clicked on the file with your user profile (your USR file) then if you chose to play the puzzle game, it would ask for your name.
If you double clicked on a demo file (DMO) then it ran but unless the narration and/or subtitles were in the same directory they were ignored. Now it checks the ToonTalk demos directory before giving up on narration and subtitles.

7/30

If a city or notebook file was corrupted then ToonTalk would often crash. It now puts up a dialog box and tries to proceed. Thanks to Tyler and Lee Breisacher for their help here.

7/31

If a city was made size 1 (just one block) then the helicopter flew funny. Thanks to Joe Pixton for pointing this out.
Updated the 4 Swedish narrations for demos.

8/2

Fixed a bug saving a robot whose thought bubble contains a blank (i.e. erased) robot.
When you copied a blank robot the copy was not blank.
Sometimes when many trucks were driving around in a city some drove off into the water or through houses. Thanks to Joe Pixton for pointing this out.

8/11

If a robot in another house was dropping things on a notebook while you or a robot you were watching was also doing so, ToonTalk got confused. Thanks to Tyler Breisacher for reporting this.
If a robot in another house was dropping things on a notebook and you picked up the notebook you could sometimes stop the robot.
If ToonTalk offered trouble shooting help just as it started (for example, about why it might have crashed the previous time), then after the dialog ToonTalk was not quite restored properly. Either the screen was white until you pressed enter or the colors were wrong.
If ToonTalk was started with -tts_uses_ds 1 (so the text-to-speech engine uses DirectSound) then it would crash if you quit ToonTalk while Marty was talking.

8/12

If you finished all the puzzles, quit and then chose Play Game then ToonTalk would sometimes crash. Thanks to Joe Pixton for reporting this.
If you finished all the puzzles, quit and then chose Play Game then ToonTalk then ToonTalk would be put up a dialog box asking if you wanted to start over. The dialog box was often buried under other windows.

8/14

When you put something on the ToonTalk clipboard object, the encoding includes spaces. Some mail readers ignore leading spaces causing the encodings to not load. Fixed but encodings produced by beta 14 or later cannot be read by beta 13 or earlier. Or earlier than 1.01 in the product version.
The instructions that accompany a clipboard encoding now include where to find the ToonTalk clipboard remote control.

8/15

If you typed enter to make a multi-line variable text pad (like the one's that label your notebook), then sometimes there was a single pixel gap between lines.
If you typed rubout to the "which picture" remote control if the picture was synthetic (but not rectangular) or it was text then it didn't remove the last digit.
If you flipped a text pad over, set it down, pointed to it, and pressed 'f' nothing happened. It now adds 'f' to the text string.

8/18

If you exited the full-screen 16-bit version with Alt-F4 during the first puzzle or the first robot puzzle then the dialog box offering help was not visible. (It looked like it crashed but pressing Enter answered the dialog box and freed things up.

8/19

Reworked the clipboard encoding to rely upon the Base64 encoding used by MIME mail. This is both more compact and uses only characters that mail system will certainly leave untouched. Thanks to Daniel Biddle for suggesting this.
Sometimes when putting a robot on the clipboard that came from a notebook, the encoding of the robot was very large since it included an encoding of the notebook as well. It worked but was wasteful.
The hints for puzzle #35 suggested you vacuum up a 1 when you should just erase it. Thanks to Lennart Mogren for reporting this.

8/26

If you vacuumed away the contents of a robot's thought bubble while he was still part of a team and then gave the team a box, then after retraining the robot ToonTalk crashed. You can now only retrain a robot after separating him from the team. Thanks to Tyler Breisacher for reporting this problem.
Sometimes when a bird flies out from under a picture then what she is holding was invisible for a while.
If the number of frames was over 210,000 then the frames per second calculation in the users log file was wrong. Thanks to Daniel Biddle for reporting this.

8/27

If a robot was trained to use the main notebook then sometimes and you stood up while he was running then sometimes the robot would wait for you to sit again. Also the notebook would sometimes get to be very tall. Thanks to Julian Pixton for help with this.

8/28

Puzzle number 74 the hints had \ rather than / for division. Thanks to Daniel Biddle for reporting this.
Sometimes when running ToonTalk in Window you got the message "Window multiple ok now." in your log file. Thanks to Daniel Biddle for reporting this.

8/31

Restored the old (and documented) behavior of the controller for the visibility of pictures. "See All" and "See Some" differed only if the picture had sub pictures added to it. Now it controls whether the black background is visible.
With the restoration of the old meaning of the visibility controller the default for pictures in the notebook on page 2 is now "See Some".
Sometimes when saving a notebook some pages were lost.

9/1

Changed the meaning of "See Nothing" for the visibility remote control when a picture has had pictures added to it. Previously they too became invisible but not any longer. You must set their visibility remote controls to "See Nothing" as well. Also if a picture is part of an invisible (See Nothing) picture then its collision detectors detect collisions, not with other parts of that picture, but with pictures that are "siblings" of the picture it is a part of.
The notebook of remote controls for a picture had the fixed width (ugly) form of text pads.

9/2