Thursday, March 10, 2011

Running a little late

I am growing increasingly frustrated with Monodevelop. From random crashes with no warning, to a debugger that only says "evaluating" on variables indefinitely, to some of the recent problems I've been having. I was hoping to have shops ready two or three days ago, and they are indeed mostly done - all I should have to do is put in code for picking up and dropping items while in a shop.

But, I've never been able to get to a shop. Early on, in the first two or three days, I figured "Hmm, I should refine creatures so they aren't so complicated to work with before I go doing something like shop interaction." So I did, and started going line by line and revising my code. Well, in doing so, I broke some things - one of the first things I did was change how status effects work. Instead of every single creature tracking every single status that could affect them, whether they had it and how much time was left on it... I made a "Status" class and had creatures have a list of statuses, which most of the time would be empty and hence take up near nil processing or memory.

That broke just about everything that used the old system. So I went through and fixed it up. Well, plenty of things still kept giving errors. Problem was - it was hard to tell why anything was causing an error, because Monodevelop seems to decide at random whether to show you what's in a variable or not. So I would just try different things until it worked. Which is what ate up most of the rest of the time. I also got shops theoretically generating in villages.

Just recently I got it compiling and running again. I'd broken the draw code as well, a mixed problem of changing how statuses work and condensing draw info into a GfxTile object. Just now got that fixed, as well as (I think) everything I broke with Vector2's while circumventing a stupid problem to do with reference types and structs. But now at present I'm having an utterly RAEG inducing fight trying to figure out what's causing a "stack overflow in an unmanaged context", which really means I just have an endless loop somewhere, but Monodevelop's lost track of what called it in the first place.

I've also got a ton of other stuff I'm doing. I've got web classes, which are looking to be really time-consuming this semester with 3D model making, texture making, simulation programming, and more. I'm wanting to program an operating system in C# using something called Cosmo. I'm wanting to make a text parser/chatterbot called LEGION. And I have another secret project that I've been toying around with. Not to mention I'm moving (if the house deal will ever close), and designing a room that will be built from scratch to be a recreation room with a pool table.

So, I'm sorry for the slow going, but I really am quite busy, and Adventurer is just one of many things I am interested in getting done. I can't spend ^all^ my time chasing cryptic error messages and punching the messengers until they do what I need them to. Depending on how difficult this most recent batch of problems could be, Adventurer could be out tonight, or it could be out next week.