Only a short update this week, I’m afraid; this week I’ve been busy putting some of the final touches to my book and haven’t had as much time to program as I wanted; only half a day rather than a full day. As such, this week’s update is very short, but next week’s should be longer. However, in light of my new decision to have a gradual update log, I’m still going to do this post and then next week’s, instead of compressing both updates into one longer update. As such, this week:
- Most centrally, I’ve finished the task of moving the code that exchanges default words for the preferred word of a given civilization. In some cases this was being called twice, and in other cases not at all, and even though in some cases it was correctly being called once, the range of situations this was being used in were making it all rather unclear. I’ve finished making this shift, which required moving around quite a bit of the sentence generation code and adding some new code to re-handle things like punctuation and capitalisation, but I think that’s now done and working correctly.
- I’ve been going through and removing a lot of phrases, and a lot of word orders, which sound strange. As several people have pointed out, sentences could sometimes come out rather strangely; I’ve tried to fix as many of these as I can. At the same time, though, some of the interesting but logical sentences are generated from the same sources as the interesting but illogical sentences; it’s tricky to strike the right balance here. As ever, I think this will just need lots of playtesting.
- Just stated sketching out (on paper) a list of the bugs and small issues that need to be resolved before 0.8 is released; I had a bunch of smaller lists of this sort, but I hadn’t really collated them into one place before. For some of the bugs I’ve decided they don’t need fixing until 0.9, and some of them I decided it was easier to simply remove the thing that caused the bug (temporarily) than to fix the bug now; as I’ve said several times, I’m really trying to do the absolute minimum now required to get 0.8 released, and putting some of this stuff off until 0.9 is definitely the way to go.
I’m afraid that’s all for now, folks. Should get a full day to code next week, so should be back with a larger update next time around. See you all next weekend!
