VectorStorm Blog

Seems like I spend an awful lot of my time apologising for not posting more often.  Sorry about that!  ;)

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the new user interface code — it’s now tightly integrated with the new save game code that I talked about a few months ago;  the same way that the new game systems know about the data they store (and so can automatically save data out and load it in), they can now display and modify that data within UI elements.  Or at least, that’s beginning to work — right now I’m still having to create the screens manually, as there are many bits of data which need to be saved and loaded, but which I don’t want to expose to end-user editing.  (For example, the amount of cash on hand, the current tech levels, etc.)

I’ve also been improving a lot of the basic “mix-in” classes, which previously were doing some evil and non-obvious maths.  I’ve now fixed that;  these fixes will be merged back into the public trunk, eventually.

After all this back-end work, I’m really looking forward to returning to more usual in-game code, instead of all this user interface stuff!

There’s an interesting article over on tentonhammer.com about the method being used by the number-crunchers at Cryptic, for adjusting character stats when gaining levels in Champions Online.  I find this sort of behind-the-scenes view at the number crunching to be fascinating, and probably justifies my intentions to abstract that sort of detail away from MMORPG Tycoon’s internal game simulation.

I can’t imagine that the folks playing MMORPG Tycoon for fun would want to manually adjust levelling-up-character-stat parameters like that!  ;)