Well, I spent a big chunk of this week skirting the edge of a minor stress breakdown, but other than that it wasn’t bad. I think I got a lot done. There may actually be a connection there, I’m not sure. My memory of what exactly got accomplished is a bit hazy, but I’m pretty sure something did. Fortunately, I happen to keep a daily devblog handy for just such occasions.
Let’s see: According to this, I finished up my tools for converting Flash native graphics objects into xml and back, but I haven’t yet had an opportunity to test them to make sure they work. I added some convenient direct saving and loading functions as well, so that I wouldn’t have to duplicate that simple file I/O code elsewhere. I completely destroyed the old detail editor (goodbye, a couple of weeks of work) since it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, and created a test particle system in the level data files so I could make sure everything works in terms of converting particle data to and from xml (it does – at least, the from does, I haven’t tested the to). Beyond that, I mostly just fixed any run-time errors that came up and made minor improvements and fixes here and there, as necessary.
Man, it has been so damn long since I did anything besides programming on this project. Not since the beginning of the year. That’s terrible. But… I’m getting so close to finishing the primary project engine. All of the major components are in place now, it’s just fixing up the editors, making a few improvements I’ve thought of, and nailing down a couple of specific processes (melee interaction, primarily). I’d set some sort of milestone deadline here, except for I honestly don’t have enough control over my life to be able to commit to that kind of timetable.
Still, it feels like the end is in sight. Maybe. In a month or two…
Well, either way, for my own health and sanity and continued productivity, I’m going to be taking this weekend off. As alluded to at the beginning of this post, accumulated stress was really catching up to me this week, and a couple of days were pretty dicey.
So, a couple of days off, then I wrap up the functional component of the particle engine and dive into the editor for it. I’ve been tossing some ideas around in the back of my head, and I think at least the basic place-and drag of different detail types should be reasonably straightforward. Going into the nitty-gritty of specific particle behaviors… will be less straightforward. Still, this feels feasible. Probably, in fact, no more difficult than the entity editor was. Hopefully, I’ll have at least a rough outline of the effects editor for next week’s dev blog post.
Well, that’s all for this week. It was a rough week, but not an unproductive one, and one which leaves me with high hopes for the future, however distant it may yet be. Until next time, then.