End of Month 5 - November; Full Persistence and Save Files

I'm not dead. I'd just locked myself away in a white room, with only a television, a bed, and a computer to fulfill my needs. And guess what? I only watch TV out of utter boredom or to get a laugh out of the ads. As in, laugh at some of the cheap marketing techniques that no one should really fall for, but do. But mostly, I spent my time working on this update.

I cannot begin to describe the complexity of what went on here. Wait, I think I can: I can perfectly (presumably, there may be bugs) recreate a session's universe based on what I've saved in text files. They are relatively small. A universe in which I dived down fifty levels was less than 300 kb saved. Basically, I crammed a universe into 2 million on/off switches, and can recreate it all from those files. It wasn't easy, either; there is no command to write what's in memory to the hard drive that I know of. I had to write it all in legible text based on what is in memory, and save it to a plain text file. What all this means for you? Truly persistent levels and save files. When you drop an item and come back, it will still be there.

I had some hilarious bugs while I was working on this, too. At one point, I was randomly switching bodies with random wildlife. Dragon on a rampage through the forest, while I was suddenly a wolf. We had whole inventories shuffling from one creature to another. I was suddenly a quest giver. And I can't even near promise all the bugs are out. But it seemed to work well enough after a fair amount of play testing.

As for the statistics so far. 1308 downloads grand total. 549 blog views this month, up 27.38%. 636 code page views, up 36.77%. $4.63 in ads grand total, $0.66 this month. No donations. So it seems that views are definitely on the rise, and downloads are either maintaining or growing in their rate. While the money is lackluster, I don't mind. I've learned a lot on the way and maybe I've given a few people a few minutes of fun. And I will continue to work diligently.

Next week... wow. Let's see if I can't get something simple done to get back on track, and submit Monday. Perhaps the things I've been saying the past three weeks. Maybe graveyard entries. That would be partially on the road to bones files.