Last post about save game stuff, I promise!

Here’s a quick screenshot of my test of the new “auto savefile handling” that I’ve been talking about for the past few days;  it seems to work reasonably well!  And it’s hilighted a few issues;  like that I apparently have both a “loggedIn” and an “online” value on my player characters;  I really ought to get rid of one of those two — they mean the same thing!  I suspect that one of them dates back to MMORPG Tycoon 1, and the other was accidentally added while I was adjusting the Toon to support MMORPG Tycoon 2’s new multiple-characters-per-subscriber model.

I haven’t moved very much of my game data over into this new system yet;  I’d estimate that I’ve only moved about a third of the data on the main “Toon” simulated in-game characters.  But it’ll be pretty trivial to move more data across, now that the basic system is in place;  it doesn’t require changing any game code, it just involves declaring the data in a slightly different manner, so that the saving code knows where to find it.  I’m quite pleased with the system overall;  it should make coping with (and debugging!) this huge amount of data a whole lot easier.

There’s still a few minor loose ends to be sorted out (the worst of these are handling arrays and enumerated values), but this is basically functional now, so the whole “maintaining save game files” issue is now looking much less scary, and so I’m going to get back onto game mechanics for a while.  Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be able to get the various Design user interface screens back up and working;  I’m eager to get all of that accessible again!