Builds:
So it’s been just a little over two weeks since the Milestone 8 build, and I’m absolutely exhausted. :)
Milestone 9 is almost identical to milestone 8, except that it adds very (very) early support for saving and restoring game state. And milestone 8 was almost identical to milestone 7 in terms of gameplay mechanics, so if you’re new, you’ll want to check the instructions in the milestone 8 and milestone 7 posts, or you won’t know what’s going on.
Some notes on the save game support. There are a small number of things which aren’t yet being saved/loaded:
- The amount of cash you currently have available is reset whenever you load your game.
- The current ‘game time’ is not saved/loaded.
- Your MMORPG’s current technological state similarly isn’t yet being saved.
- The specifics of PCs’ current activities. After a load, they’ll make a new decision about what to do, instead of necessarily continuing what they were doing before. This often can lead to (for example) social groups spontaneously breaking up after a load. This is a TODO to fix at some point in the future.
- Any PC which is currently traveling will lose the path they’re following, which means that they’ll happily move in a straight line to their destination, ignoring all obstacles in their way. This also is a TODO to fix.
- The costume used for each PC/NPC/monster class is not yet being saved. They’ll likely be generated as different colors each time you load a save.
Everything else should work — map layout, region zoning, edited terrain types, roads and passes, building placements, towns, monsters and players and subscribers and etc. Should all just work. Please bang on it a little and let me know if you spot anything misbehaving!
It’s worth noting that in this build, the saved game files are in a plain text format, and should be viewable/editable in any text editor (which understands UNIX-style line endings. Sorry about that.) RIght now, a saved game tends to clock in at about 1.5 megabytes, but could get larger as an MMORPG grows. I haven’t really tested saves very far into the game, yet.
Under Windows, you should find the saved games in C:/Users/<your name>/AppData/Roaming/VectorStorm/MMORPG Tycoon 2/save/sandbox/
Under OSX, you should find the saved games in ~/Library/Application Support/VectorStorm/MMORPG Tycoon 2/save/sandbox
Under Linux (if you’re me, since I haven’t worked out how to set up the linux build so anybody but me can run it. If there’s demand for this, please let me know!), you’ll find them in ~/.local/share/VectorStorm/MMORPG Tycoon 2/save/sandbox
In the future, I’ll be compressing these save files so that they take up less hard disk space.
It’s also worth noting that games saved when playing a scenario (such as the tutorial) will go into a different directory, and won’t be available to load, in this build.
