.plan (Copyright Grimoire Systems Pty. Ltd. All Rights Reserved)

17-12-2000
"Texas Arcane" (Cleve Blakemore, Senior Programmer, Grimoire & AGL)

First:

1. I'm not bellyaching about the delays any more. I could care less. I've been busy earning a living as a consultant, the game fell right off the accountability sheet for two years, that's it. No pity thanks. Time to finish the damned thing.

2. In doing the first hard serious review of the code in two years, a couple of things are obvious ...
This game is fantastic. No doubt about it.
It is only a few yards from the finish line.
It had far fewer problems upon close examination than I realized. There is nothing here I can't wrap up and finish quickly if I am stroking at the same level of productivity I was giving it in 1997. In terms of major bugs, systemic problems, completely botched design ... there isn't any. This game is nearly ready for prime-time.

3. I'd play this game. I do now. I have made the CRPG that I always wanted, it is everything I wanted. I owe it to the world to complete it.

Last night I actually saw Grimoire compiled for the first time in four years WITH NO WARNINGS! I ALMOST HAD A HEART ATTACK!

I had so many flashbacks last night fixing the warnings it was like I entered a time machine! When we started under (!) Turbo C++ for DOS way back in late 1994, space was an absolute premium so every single value was never assigned a short where a char would do as well and I used bitflags for anything representing a boolean. My vision at that time was for a little rinky dink real mode 320x200x256 DOS shareware game using the ACK3D Engine (remember that thing) that would probably inhabit no more than 500K when unzipped.

A lot of water under the bridge since then!

Nowadays, unless there is a compelling reason everything is an int of course - so one of hundreds of warnings generated by the compiler build involved type mismatches in returns and assignments. Needless to say, I sat down and fixed this crap, stumbling across lots of iffy things as well I corrected.

I am running the game under the Win API at the moment for easy debugging with Direct X code commented out. The full screen mode set to 800x600 with no Direct X at all runs pretty good though, without anything but blits under FastGraph. The final version will run exclusive full screen DX of course.

Okay, where are we headed right now? Where are the priorities? What kind of time frame are we looking at? I feel like a man who has awakened from a decade long dream ala Rip Van Winkle and now has to catch up on his own local history before he can rejoin his village.

My most pressing mission right now is general configuration and state control, involving all the game options and the saved games, plus things like Superhero mode where you can't save a game and if you die that's it, your party is gone. If you think we have not lifted the bar in five years, guess what ... this stuff is all in XML configuration files now! Even the config manager is configured by an XML file. Believe me, Grimoire II is going to be a pristine model of scripted elegance with nary a touch to the run-time engine other than bug fixing. The sequel will be made in scripts and we won't touch the engine. This will make Grimoire III with the editing suite included a realistic goal to work towards.

After this config is working, I have to do some heavy coding on the NPC interaction, resting interface, lockpicking (will that thing ever be 100% done?) and lots of PC Review and Level Advancement stuff.

Still ... I can see the light at the end this time. Honest.

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