Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. I figure it's been a long enough delay that I should write a status update. Progress is slow but I've been working on it when I get free time, mostly on weekends.

The pathfinding works (except for one bug - objects register as obstacles, grr). The scripting language has quite a lot more features now, and can be executed for spells, skills, and weapon attacks. Says work (other than says the chat framework is game-independent, though it's simple at present so that's not very exciting). Goals are new (well, about a month old, but I haven't done updates for a while...). You know how in Starcraft you can tell characters to Move, Patrol, etc., and if you hold Shift down you can queue those up? Well, I put that in. It's accessible to script also, and 'Say' is a goal, so you can for example write:

creature.AddGoal(Goals.Bow());
creature.AddGoal(Goals.Say("Hi! Follow me to some tile!"));
creature.AddGoal(Goals.MoveTo(tile));

Lately I've been working on serialization (saving/loading from disk). It sounds easy but because I'm trying to make map objects inheritable from each other it actually has a lot of non-obvious issues I'm having to tackle. Of course, given a good 20 hours of free time I could finish it, but I rarely have that much time all at once these days. The nice thing about the setup I'm coding right now is that once it works it'll be able
to store everything, with little to no special casing.

Once serialization is done there'll be remoting code to do. Specifically, code to filter what each client actually knows. For simplicity I have every client knowing everything going on in the game right now, but what needs to happen is clients only knowing about what their characters are able to see (...and a little extra so it's not laggy), which means 'view' objects (which need to be unattached to characters - for example True Seeing in Warcraft 2). Then the default high level AI (in script) and an allegience system to go with it, spawner objects (easy), and finally code cleanup, after which point I'm pretty sure I'll start on a map editor. Somewhere in between these things I'll have to figure out a stat system. After all that is done, it'll be time to begin on content (and perhaps sound, hmm).

Soooo that's the road map from here.