All UI and No Play Makes Yak a Dull Boy

I haven’t been working on much the last week. Since it’s summer in this part of the world, and since our summer is short, I tend to spend the weekends outdoors as much as possible. Didn’t get much done this week because of work and low energy, but I did put the UI stuff in the background again, and return to campaign work. Joemac and Sick are changing a lot of stuff right now with the UI code, so I’m going to let the dust settle there before going back. Also, the TR team is still working on how they want the new web site and UI to look, so it’s a good time to pause on the UI.

Have Terrain, Will Travel

I don’t think the Mac bug with “tool” has been fixed yet, so I got a windows copy from Joemac and built a TR terrain using Parallels VM. (And no, I don’t care that you think VMware is better: I paid for Parallels early on before VMware could be bothered with Mac users, and it works just fine for my purposes). I haven’t hooked up the new terrain yet, I’ll do that next week I hope. 

Next Task: Saving/Restoring Campaign State

My next job is to start moving away from my campaign testing script, which ran a kind of accelerated campaign when you clicked a button. Pilot actions were all simulated.  What I’ve been working on this week (or meaning to work on, anyway) is adapting the code so that you can have cold starts (fresh campaign) or re-starts based on the last saved campaign data. Based on my comments in the campaign code, I see that I’m targeting a campaign length of about 3 weeks long. More than enough chances for the server to crash (probably same “Chinese hackers” that are hitting up those congressman’s pcs!), Bloo to stumble through and yank out the power cord, or the server to collapse in self-pity when faced with 300 raving TR fans shooting each other down all night long (Hey! I can dream, can’t I!?). Smooth sailing so far, thanks to these little TW lua gems: 

table.read( <filename> )
table.write( <Lua table>, <filename> )

You can read more about these here.

That’s it for now, back next week.