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[Toady One]

I've done world definitions so far...  you can save them and load them and copy them and delete them and all that.

I still need to do universes and actual save games.  Many headaches to come, but I can use all the same scrolling and file functions and so on for them, so they will be less work in that way at least.

[Toady One]

Hmmm...  certain aspects of saving universes entail a major overhaul of some code portions.  I'm not sure how long it will take yet.  Don't count on anything for next weekend.

[Toady One]

The overhaul is going a lot faster than I anticipated...  I just changed about 400 little bits and pieces of code, and it still runs.  I'm about halfway there.  My schedule is a little hectic midweek (my calculus students have a midterm!!!!), but if all goes well I might actually get something out on Sunday.

BTW, if you were interested in Alanor's space game and link into the Armok forum, you can click on "Bay 12 Games Forum" above to get to the other area where he's posted a progress report.

[Alanor]

Darn it!
I hid it over there so that i would have a chance to make progress before the next hammer came down!!!!!

ARG

hehe

[Toady One]

California is hot and this house is hotter and this room is hotter than that, but somehow I managed to finish almost all of the clean up.  This is surprising, since I rewrote little parts of everything...  basically, I need to keep track of what is referring to what, so I don't save pointless objects (like inventory items of creatures that you ran away from).  The problem was that when you delete an item, all of the actions and so on that refer to it need to be altered.  For instance, if you are processing a corpse at the same time that somebody is trying to pick it up, and the processing destroys the object, the pick up action of the other creature needs to be deleted or altered.  The way I dealt with this before wasn't very save-friendly, so it had to be changed.

There might still be some problems -- we'll see as I finish the cleaning tonight and Thursday.  Wednesday is totally packed:

Morning: classes, math reading
3PM-6:30PM: office hours
6:30PM-9:15PM: proctor exam
9:15PM-THURSDAY: grade exam

However, since there is an Armok log entry for every day from March 24th, 2002, I'll have to find time to do at least one thing  I only cheated once -- April 17th, 2002 says "Had a birthday"  I must allow myself certain luxuries to perpetuate my thankless grind...  I guess I'm a real Slave to Armok...  he he he...

[Demon]

Its not thankless!  Every time I see a new version up I think of how great it is that someone else is programming this!    :p

[Toady One]

Not to mention that my already impoverished ass is eating the no-banners-or-popups web hosting fees and paid the hefty license fee for this bulletin board...  maybe I should declare Bay 12 a non-profit organization and solicit donations that you can write off on your taxes...  I am after all providing a free service which contributes to the edification and corruption of the human race.

Back to linear algebra day -> office hours begin shortly...  this will be the last message as my spacecraft passes to the dark side of the moon...  I hear voices...  THEY ARE COMING!  BREAK OUT THE CHALK!

[Toady One]

I survived the grading experience.  I've finished up all of the clean up nonsense, so I'm back to saving.  The cleaning has doubtless introduced 129873987 new crash bugs.  I've caught 2 of them.  A wiley quad clawed and bit me to pieces (there were bone chips and skin chunks scattered around) without a crash, but I haven't tried applying pressure or corpse processing yet.

[Toady One]

I finished most of the universe saving functions today.  I'm going to try and finish those tomorrow, and do the actual save game functions on Sunday.  A Sunday release date is looking really unlikely, because the cleaning I did before has totally screwed up corpse processing.  Maybe I can still make it.  I'll give another update tomorrow...  I have to go to sleep early so I can finish grading and entering grades into the computer by the deadline.  7AM...  I'm not sure I'll survive getting up that early, but it must be done...

[Toady One]

I've finished the universe save/load functions.  Technically.  For some reason, empires and dropped items disappear on load.  I'll try to puzzle this one out tonight.

[Toady One]

I managed to fix it up, although it still feels vaguely unstable.  Maybe I'm just not used to it yet.  Save files are way too big right now...  there's a lot of worthless information stored in corpse pieces for instance, and the game saves every little tissue chunk that was torn off of your player or anything else at any time.  The ability to travel all quickly around the world (which was never meant to be permanent) also allows a player to bloat the file pretty fast with empire/town/building information and so on.

For example, after playing a few fairly simple games in the same universe, my file was around 700K.  Of course, those Woolly Bears tore my last player into pieces for a long time before she finally died.

In any case, I have to finish actual save games before I see how large these files will actually be.  Then I can think about trimming them down.

To end on a positive note, actual save games were the last thing I was planning before the release.  I might be able to finish it up for Sunday night, maybe not.

[Toady One]

I've written up all of the menus.  I just need to make the function that saves games, and the one that loads them.  It should be fairly straight forward, although a bit tedious (if you save the game when something is attacking you, it needs to save that action, for instance -- there's just a lot of things that need to be put on disk).

I'm still not sure if I'll finish tonight -- one of my friends is taking qualifying exams in a month and is starting to stress a bit about them, so we're going to talk over some problems tonight, I think.  I don't know exactly when, but I won't have a full programming evening tonight.

[Toady One]

I didn't quite make it -- and I'm not nearly done yet.  I've been hitting a number of bugs.  Although I've dealt with the ones I've found, I still need to write most of the save/load game functions.

[spelguru]

I want an updaaaaaaaaaaaaaate! *CRYING*

[spelguru]

I got a new signature... look at it now!