I have been very busy the last two weeks, working on alternate reality the remake. It has been mostly about debugging getting the code ready for testing. I have created a logging system that can be turned on so during testing anybody can turn on the logging system and all the logs will be saved. To a file that can be passed on, that will be easier for me to debug the issue that’s going on. To turn on logging to a file is just a command paramter when starting.
As I was goning through eliminating bugs, I’ve come up with two things that I was not happy about. One of the features I was not happy with was screen resolution, in the original version was “if statements” all over the code for different types of screen resolution to be able to know when to display this and that. When I converted that to Java I made some enhancement, I created variables for screen resolutions for different drawings, those are all set at the start of the game, this allowed me to remove all those “if statements” throughout the code. But still had all those variable and having to adjust them for each resolution. I was never happy with that solution. I rewrote a lot of the rendering of all the features of software, this time I let opengl do all the scaling so it does not matter what your screen resolution you use. To opengl it’s the same resolution every single time, so there’s nothing in the code anymore for all the different sizes this will help out much better. So the canvas for opengl is always the same thing no matter what the resolution. This allows opengl to scale the pixel to a full screen to the small resolution of the canvas.
The second thing I found that was not going to make it easier to expand on, was the city and the dungeon was all hard-coded throughout the entire software. So I stripped out the city in the dungeon code from the game altogether. I turned each one of those into a module but the game will load at the start you tell which modules are available and it will be able to use those, that way when it’s ready you just plug it in the module. this will allow easy future expansions without having to redownload everything it can just do it in you know modules you download and install. Each module, chain control many aspects of the game like fix treasure, fixed and counters, weather, Random Encounters, and of course the map.
With this new module system alternate reality the remake, is turning into just a RPG game engine. there are a couple big things that would require changes for this to be 100% true. A module would have to be able to alter by adding or deleting items, spells, encounters. This is not a priority for me, I will keep looking into this but not focus on it.
Right now my focus is going through each encounter one by one to verify their fighting and functionality is working correctly. The next step after that is going through each item and verify they function properly and then finally spells. Once I have a generally debugged these items the city will be ready for testing. There there is a couple minor things left for coating but it’s about 98% code complete without the new features.