Psyche - Still not 0.0.1. It's mostly just a bug fix, I'm still not at that "this is at least a good time waster" level on how much of a game I feel it is. Although adding minimum depth creatures certainly added a good deal of that flavor. The major thing I've done in this update is fix a huge deal of bugs of varying importance, from pathfinding accounting for creatures in the way to crashing when a creature died while carrying too many items. There's more to be done, but I caught quite a bit in this update. But I don't feel I did quite enough with this one. Mainly, I'm holding back for the next update, which is probably going to cause more bugs.
Specifically, the next update is all about taking XNA out of the game and switching to OpenGL. OpenGL is used in things like Dwarf Fortress, and it's the leading competitor to DirectX. And more importantly, it is a cross-platform thing that almost no one should have to download anything extra for. I'm getting at it with something called the Tao framework, for C#. Since OpenGL is cross-language, it needs a 'binding'. Which is basically what Tao is. A go-between for C# to OpenGL commands. OpenGL itself being a platform-independent way of getting at various output and input stuff. It should involve no work for the end user. Most should be able to just unzip the archive and play the executable file directly. No more downloading huge frameworks and hoping it works.
With this, the requirements should drop to near nil, and it may in fact fix some crash on startup problems people have been having. So that's what's going on next week. It'll be a big week. In fact, I'm not sure just how big of a thing this is going to be until I get in there and do it. If it's much worse than I'm thinking, it may stretch on for longer than my usual weekly update. Hopefully not. It may even be shorter, letting me play around with more tangible updates in the gameplay. So see you next week.
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