Friday, October 31, 2008

Day 293: No Nano

Lately I haven't been hewing to my 'one hour per day' quota. At all. Whatsoever. And suddenly, hey, it's November and I'm looking at two months until my deadline for releasing this wacky thing. November is, as I've alluded to before, National Novel Writing Month, and I've wanted to participate this year.

THAT ISN'T HAPPENING!

Instead, I'm dedicating my NaNo time to working on this game - an hour and a half per day, every day. My goal is to actually finish everything by the end of the month, giving me a month to hand over the beta to people and watch as they rain bug reports upon my poor undefended soul.

I started a day early - I began phase 1 of my XML overhauls quite a while back. I was suffering from "arrow XML", which looked a lot like this:

<object>
<child name="foo">
<other_object>
<child name="bar">
<yet_another_object/>
</child>
</other_object>
</child>
</object>

Now imagine it nested about twenty levels deep.

It seemed like it'd be fairly straightforward to write each object out one by one and then just refer to them by ID, but - as it turned out - it wasn't. Changing the way my parser worked exposed some deep bugs in the system that I hadn't seen before, and I was forced to quash them!

Now, however, it works. Thus, National Game Finishing Month begins!

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Day 276: Rebel Yell

Much like the last blog, much work was done this time around on the planets. As you might deduce from the title, this time around I did all the rebels. What this means is that I'm done with planets....

Which pretty much means I'm done with normal content creation altogether. I'm going to have to go ahead with my earlier mass-distribution system, which means lots of coding. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it was always less tedious to code than make new content for the game. On the other hand, making new content was a very casual thing, I could just sit down and work for a bit. We'll see how it turns out.

Other things include me re-thinking the XML I'm doing. Here's what it looks like now:

<sector x=5 y=7 ...>
<child name="planets">
<planet .../>
</child>
</sector>

There's a lot of stuff being replaced by those ellipses. And I mean a /lot/. Multi-line text fields are the most common. I'd like to merge them as their own elements. So it'd be something like this:

<sector tag="foo">
<fields>
<x>5</x>
<y>7</y>
</fields>
<children>
<planets>
<planet/>
</planets>
</children>
</sector>

It's more verbose, but I also think it's an easier read. At least, when I'm debugging, it's a pain in the ass to try to locate the one field I need in a sea of text. This way they're at least on their own line.

Converting between the two will be... interesting. I think I'll start a data-format versioning system so new versions of the game will be able to understand old/differently formatted data, or at least reject it out of hand. Then I'll use the magic of XSLT to change everything I've written so far from the old format to the new.

I just learned XSLT recently, and I'm liking it. It may end up being my patch tool of choice!

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Day 269: Alliance

Oh, my lacking blogging/development schedule.

Today I finished up every single sector of the Alliance by tagging and placing planets where they belong. And very little - if any - code was written in the process.

As evidenced by this rather short entry, I have a great deal less to say when I'm making content for the game then when I'm coding.

Ah well. Entry post go!