I’m expecting to have MS3 builds up in about six hours. I have all the milestone requirements completed — now I just need to do some general cleanup before packaging together builds.
In the end, I crashed and burned over most of the weekend, so didn’t get anything more than the basic requirements completed (plus, I got to spend some quality time with the family). So don’t expect to see anything from the supplemental list I posted last week. (Although I still really want to fix up the placement of monsters. Maybe I still have time to do that)
Today I ran into an awkward issue: A few weeks ago I upgraded VectorStorm to compile against the new version of Box2D — version 4.3.0. Which isn’t backward-compatible with earlier versions of Box2D. Silly me, I had forgotten to update my Windows Box2D libraries. So I ended up spending most of this morning wrangling Box2D so that I could make Windows builds.
The funny thing, of course, is that MMORPG Tycoon 2 doesn’t use Box2D. But it’s still a build requirement for the VectorStorm library. At some point I need to strip it out of the base library, so that it can be included for projects which want to use it, and left out of the projects which don’t. (I don’t seem to use it much, actually — The “Asteroids” game in the testbeds uses it, although it didn’t originally, and the “Thunderstorm” and “C-4 Ten Four” Game in a Week games used it. Everything else currently on this site does not. And during the development of 10 (unreleased), I integrated the Bullet physics engine into one of the forms of that game. It would perhaps make sense to make a pluggable physics interface in VectorStorm, so you can use whichever physics library you like, or none at all, instead of requiring Box2D in addition to whatever else you want to use, as is currently the case)
But I do now have Windows builds working again, so it’ll be easy to push whatever last-minute changes go into the build over to there.
An interesting note is that this site has a surprisingly high number of Linux users reading it (Which is awesome!) I won’t be releasing a Linux build of MMORPG Tycoon 2 MS3 today, but if there’s interest, I’d absolutely love to put one together. The code does compile and run on Linux. I just don’t know the proper way to package up a binary build on Linux. If somebody reading this knows how to do that, please drop me an e-mail and we’ll work something out about it. I definitely do want to ship a Linux build of the final MMORPG Tycoon 2 on its eventual release day — just don’t quite know how to wrangle it, yet. Maybe just hook up a .dpkg package?
