Saturday, November 26, 2005

The devil has a mustache.


A screen shot of the first part of my conversation engine


It's the first part of my conversation engine! (click for full size) Isn't it nice. Currently it's working but I have managed to find a few bugs already. For some reason one person can happily carry on a two person conversation by themselves. I'm not quite sure how this is happening yet so I'll have to look into it.

Once again this weekend I don't have much time. Just this morning really. I managed to polish off another todo list item last night but I still have near a page left. Only two items on the page are for my goal of two weeks ago though ... the rest are fresh new bugs that I seem to have introduced or merely discovered more thouroughly. It may sound like I'm sinking in a helpless bog but I think things are actually getting better.

So yes the goals are finish up the Conversation Engine, so it doesn't have that bug. It also has crashed on the three person script but I think in that case it's a problem of not handling a malformed script gracefully.

(Of course I'm fixing these bugs by first writing failing unit tests.)

After that the current goals are:

1. Have loading and saving turns (I'm sure I knew what I meant when I wrote this ... I need to check out the code though)
2. Reproduce a texturing bug in a simplified bug so I can ask for help killing it.

Should be doable.

If you're interested in programming languages you should check out Subtext. It has an excellent flash video (how often do read that phrase, I usually loathe flash, but it's helpful here.) I think the ideas presented are pretty sound. A lot seems so obvious when it's explain that's it's a wonder such ideas haven't become popular before. Anyway check it out.

Aen's blog continues his incredibly rapidly developing tile editor. I can't believe he progresses so fast! The editor looks really cool. I really hope it revitalizes the Verge community a bit - I want more Inide RPGS! I want the days of Megazeux and ZZT to return for the Indie RPG scene!


Over on distractionware I was pointed to a very interesting "game" Rameses ( executable link ). It isn't all that interactive but it will give you a strange sensation. It's extremely well written and worth playing, to try something new. It's also small and short, I finished it at work :D

That's it really. I'm nearing the end of nanowrimo but didn't write anything yesterday or today. I'd quite to finish so I'll probably go into crunch mode monday. I'm going to leave it then and maybe revise it in a month or so.

No comments: