Believe it or not, there’s an actual update on this game. You’re probably going to download it, look at it and go “uhh James, nothing’s new.” Well, that’s not entirely true.
First off, I have to make a note that you have to erase your old character file(s) before trying to log into this version. Otherwise, it’ll probably crash. The reason for this is because the character file is now stored as XML! That’s the biggest change this version. Unfortunately for the players, the XML file is encrypted so you can’t see the beauty of the new structure. I will, however, explain it here.
In the previous versions the character information was all sorted one thing on a line with no descriptions or labels. For example, consider:
1
5
7
2
1
false
false
I came back a few months short of two years of working on this and looking at these files going “okay, so what’s this number supposed to represent?” Who knows? This was the biggest reason I wanted to switch to XML. Now when I open the decrypted player file, it shows me something like this:
<Stats>
<HP>100</HP>
<maxHP>100</maxHP>
<strength>5</strength>
</Stats>
(obviously shortened).. but the point being now when I open that file I can see IMMEDIATELY what things are. And to me that’s important. But like I said, for the players it won’t make any difference since the files are encrypted anyway to prevent people from cheating.
The next major change came with basically having to rewrite a ton of code to complement the XML format. A ton of stuff was taken out, a lot of new stuff was added. I think I have actually improved code in a lot of places. Should I ever take this game any further it should be pretty efficient.
The last major update to this version is the fact that NW is no longer on the project team for graphics. So I changed the ABOUT dialog to reflect that. I’m the only one on there now. There’s also a spiffy graphic on there, which mirrors my other projects.
And that… was the longest five hours of programming of my life.