So here’s some of the fancy shenanegans I’ve been up to lately with Gayo on Sully. I’ve been working on putting the render stack under test to hunt down some obscure bugs and mystery crashes, and that’s been going nicely. Lesson learned: FreeImage on a bad index is bad… so I augmented the verge3 engine to noisy-error in that circumstance: although we might eventually just want it to do a noop instead of doing a fragile error or doing a bad operation.

I’ve also made a bit of progress on the http://beta.verge-rpg.com site. I should work out a good stylesheet for the forums and be done with that major third of the site… although really I need to make the forum management UIs. Which are just two screens, as far as I can tell…

Nothing’s been happening on the iPhone front in the last week. I’ve been sorta really busy at week getting IMVU’s Music Portal whipped into shape. And shape has been whipped into it. So all is well now.

So, here’s what I did this week:

• Fixed the battle selection code. There were problems with the selectmap’s setup that were causing terrible, horrible, really bad problems. I was afraid it was a much more complicated problem than it ended up being. Go team venture! Clearing up this problem removed the last “major” bug blocking battle system development.
• Added the vc code to add Kildorf’s new cels into Sully.
• Augmented verge.exe so that if you use textpad’s tool option to run your verge game, and it exits, you can click on the output and it’ll open the right file at the right line number. This is, by the way, awesome.
• Reformatted the skills.dat file, and implemented the white magic spells *Shield and *Revive.
• Fixed selection so skills that require targets with specific conditions (like “can only be used on dead allies”) don’t let you select them if there are no valid targets on the field.

Isn’t that swell? As per the usual, you can grab all these updates and much, much more over at The Sully Chronicles SVN. One day I’ll do something with more exciting explanations and pretty pictures… but for now I’m more interested in actually doing lots of work than in doing lots of explanation. Sorry!

Today’s update on the ongoing adventure of SotS’s creation takes us to The Sully Chronicles.

…What?

For about three years now I’ve been planning on basing the SotS Battle System off of the one that I’ve been working on for The Sully Chronicles.

Unfortunately, the Sully Chronicles battle system was 1) never completed and 2) is currently in a state of disgrace.

It’s got a lot in place… a real lot! But to cut a very long story short, it’s in need of quality assurance and some heavy refactoring before it’s really ready for public use.

o/~ It’s time to chaaaange o/~

So, it turns out I’m moving across the country next week and starting a new job with the awesome chaps over at IMVU.com. They’re an impressive bunch of engineers there, and pre-populated with such GCE community superstars as AegisKnight (creator of Sphere, Audiere, Corona, and umpteen million other things. Also probably your mom.), TheSpeedBump (creator of Ika), Kael (creator of Fury²), and verge’s own aen!

The pertinent matter to this post being the development techniques they use over at IMVU, and it’s effect upon the sully codebase. The problem with Sully at the moment are hard to track errors stemming from a lack of accountability within the code. Turns out that the boys, nay, men of IMVU are huge, huge, HUGE proponents of Test Driven Design. So… I’m planning on applying the techniques I’m going to have drummed into my head over the next few weeks to Sully so forward progress can be made again.

I’ll revise this post more shortly. Let me post this bitch so it doesn’t look like I lost first. >_>

Lookit teh pretty werks:

http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sully/ for the sully repository. Notice the nice, new trunk/branches dichotomy. Exciting, eh?