Inkeeper's Diaries

So, what with trying to make college decisions, working to finish my last 10 weeks of high school, and other various things, I've decided to take a break with all of my creative projects. The reason's very simple: creating has become work.

When I have downtime, I don't want to feel guilty for just relaxing rather than doing creative work. If I want to be creative, I may work on these projects, or may work on something completely random.

Dedication to projects is important, and if I had the time, I'd just motor through and finish these projects, because I don't think they're bad, in fact, the projects I'm working on right now are all very promising. However, in a time when I've got a LOT of pressure on me and a lot of work to do, I don't want to have to deal with the pressures of projects.

So, I may update these projects if I feel like it, but at least until I've finished high school, I'm ONLY going to work when I really want to, so don't necessarily expect anything. Once I've finished high school, I'll take a look at these projects and I may come back to the best of them, but I may also drop some.

See you in ten weeks, or earlier.

Today, I worked on Innkeeper's diaries. Most of my work was in set-up or theory. A list of what I did follows.

-Made two complete alphabet charasets, for possible use in custom menus.
-Worked on theoretical structure for guest info storage, decided tentatively on storing the guests using hero spots and using the hero's attributes to store data.(pretending HP is length of stay, etc)
-Worked on chipset pass-ability.

Then my computer vomited all over everything. My test play is not working, freezing out the whole computer. I'm doing my best to deal with it, but I have no idea what is causing it. If you have any insight, please post in the comments.

So, I didn't get a whole lot done, but I did work today, and actually spent a considerable ammount of time working.

It continues.

The main work I've been working on recently here is a guest spawn system. In the game, there will be two types of guests: guests brought to the inn by special cases (called Storylines), and guests created by a random spawner.

The spawner will decide when to create guests based on time of year, the reputation and quality of the inn, and special cases (i.e, they won't come if you are full). Then it will construct guests out of the various pieces which define a guest, which at this point include:
-Name
-Length of Stay
-Type of Stay
-Introverted or Extroverted
-Probability that they'll make trouble.
-Occupation
-Destination
-Gender
And such. It has to construct the guests, then store that information so that I can access it later to do things with it. The hope is to end up with a semi-random guest spawner which works moderately well.

The issue I've been working on is the method of data storage. My first thought was to assign a numeric code to every permutation of guest, then fill a single variable with that code. Then I realized that would cause me to have to code somewhere around 10,000 permutations. Not an option.

At this point, my approach is to take these pieces of guest, combine as many I can into variables and switches, give each codes (For instances, extroverted and likely to cause trouble can be the number 1.) Then, I'll take those various variables and switches which make up a guest. I'll make as many as the inn can hold guests, and then whenever a new guest enters the inn, we can fill those variables and switches with the correct codes and positions.

So, yeah...that's what I've been working on. If you think you know how to fulfill the requirements of the spawner better(in RM2k3), leave a comment below.

The work continues.