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                    JOURNAL FOR THURSDAY 7TH OCTOBER, 2021
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: A quick update on current development
   DATE: Thu  7 Oct 18:26:21 BST 2021

Ah, October already and nearly Halloween. It’s become some what of a tradition
at Halloween that I make a release. This year finds me in somewhat of a bind
due to being busy with the experiment and rewriting everything. Will that stop
me? I don’t think so ;)

Over the last week I’ve been busy working on code for a Thing.Marshal. This
will enable any Thing be written out to a record jar file. This in turn will
enable a player’s character and all their items to be saved to disk. Actually
it would enable the whole game world to be saved to disk eventually.

This is part of the work to re-enable player accounts. I’ve started work on
the front-end that enables players to create accounts or login with existing
accounts. Players also need to be able to create a character for new accounts.
That’s quite a lot of work.

The current plan is to try and get all of this done for a Halloween release of
the first snapshot… /\oo/\

Last Halloween saw the release of v0.0.17 and there has only been one release
since then, back in April. Armed with the new code I’m confident that releases
will become more frequent — well that’s been the main goal of the experiment,
to speed up development. The experiment has come a long way. In five months I
nearly have parity with the v0.0.18 release. There is a lot more work to do
and a lot of the code has been “fast and furious” and needs a clean up. I’ve
tended to go for a make it work first, then make it nice this time around.

For now, I have a Thing.Marshal mostly finished — currently it uses a brute
force approach to saving data. Both Thing.Unmarshal and Thing.Marshal need to
be made more dynamic. I now need to work on loading existing player files. I
can then expand on that and add account and character creation.

If I can’t get the front-end finished by Halloween it’s not a big deal. There
will still be a snapshot and I’ll still be pulling the experiment Git branch
into the dev branch. Be nice to have the front-end though…

--
Diddymus


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