The big remaining productivity hit in my system comes from how data flows in and out of my projects. I abstract my game data from my programs by parsing in a series of text files that describe my games data. This allows me to use human readable files to edit game data instead of scattering it around inside the program or having some kind of binary data editors which would be hard to debug if the data seemed funky. The main problem with this system is that, especially with VC++ 6.0's edit and recompile on the go, I end up wanting to edit my game data inside of my game. In fact, with Big$hot and Real E$tate Empire, I found myself writing mini-editors so that I could edit my data on the fly - things like shifting around where for sale signs and shadows are on the game map so that everything looks just right. The problem is that I then have to hand transfer this data back to the original text files. The easy solution, I hear you saying it now... would be to write the data back out from within the game. The reason that I haven't done this is that I typically have comments that I'm not willing to discard strewn through out my data files. The answer, my friends, is a scheme I am planning on migrating the Big$hot code base to before I make any wish list additions that first adopters might request.
More tomorrow,
L
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