MMORPG Tycoon 2 Milestone 9

Builds:

So it’s been just a little over two weeks since the Milestone 8 build, and I’m absolutely exhausted.  :)

Milestone 9 is almost identical to milestone 8, except that it adds very (very) early support for saving and restoring game state.  And milestone 8 was almost identical to milestone 7 in terms of gameplay mechanics, so if you’re new, you’ll want to check the instructions in the milestone 8 and milestone 7 posts, or you won’t know what’s going on.

Some notes on the save game support.  There are a small number of things which aren’t yet being saved/loaded:

  • The amount of cash you currently have available is reset whenever you load your game.
  • The current ‘game time’ is not saved/loaded.
  • Your MMORPG’s current technological state similarly isn’t yet being saved.
  • The specifics of PCs’ current activities.  After a load, they’ll make a new decision about what to do, instead of necessarily continuing what they were doing before.  This often can lead to (for example) social groups spontaneously breaking up after a load.  This is a TODO to fix at some point in the future.
  • Any PC which is currently traveling will lose the path they’re following, which means that they’ll happily move in a straight line to their destination, ignoring all obstacles in their way.  This also is a TODO to fix.
  • The costume used for each PC/NPC/monster class is not yet being saved.  They’ll likely be generated as different colors each time you load a save.

Everything else should work — map layout, region zoning, edited terrain types, roads and passes, building placements, towns, monsters and players and subscribers and etc.  Should all just work.  Please bang on it a little and let me know if you spot anything misbehaving!

It’s worth noting that in this build, the saved game files are in a plain text format, and should be viewable/editable in any text editor (which understands UNIX-style line endings.  Sorry about that.)  RIght now, a saved game tends to clock in at about 1.5 megabytes, but could get larger as an MMORPG grows.  I haven’t really tested saves very far into the game, yet.

Under Windows, you should find the saved games in C:/Users/<your name>/AppData/Roaming/VectorStorm/MMORPG Tycoon 2/save/sandbox/

Under OSX, you should find the saved games in ~/Library/Application Support/VectorStorm/MMORPG Tycoon 2/save/sandbox

Under Linux (if you’re me, since I haven’t worked out how to set up the linux build so anybody but me can run it.  If there’s demand for this, please let me know!), you’ll find them in ~/.local/share/VectorStorm/MMORPG Tycoon 2/save/sandbox

In the future, I’ll be compressing these save files so that they take up less hard disk space.

It’s also worth noting that games saved when playing a scenario (such as the tutorial) will go into a different directory, and won’t be available to load, in this build.