nottravisgames

When the PDA is a PIA...

Added 2019-02-10 13:49:23 +0000 UTC

...but I've worked out the problem - and the solution.

So what was confusing me was why, after behaving sweeter than Sarah on her good path, the PDA had suddenly gone all HAL9000 on me. Depending on which save I was using, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, and sometimes it suddenly crashed the game.

At first I thought it was new content that was causing the issue given up until yesterday it had behaved like a charm but the answer turned out to be something else entirely. Although this initial assumption of mine did set me down several wrongs paths as I tried to rectify it.

The problem is the way it's coded into the game. Although it worked for Chapter One and the combined chapter version I was playing, due to the way I've coded it, when I played just Chapter Two not all the triggers or attributes required would be present unless you had a save in a certain path etc etc.

So, mia culpa, it's my naive coding to blame and for me pushing my coding knowledge to the edge and beyond. Rather than accepting what I can do, I try to make the game do what I want it to do.

The ultimate solution, and indeed the proper one, is to take all the coding elements for the PDA (which are currently spread around several different files) and bring them together into a single unified file that goes with each version. This will then mean regardless of which chapter you're playing or what saves you have it will continue to work perfectly.

Now I don't expect you to sympathise, nor indeed wish you too. But, I'm running now on just a few hours sleep in 48 hours and now probably isn't the time to try and attempt coding surgery. So what I'm going to do is get my head down for a bit and see how easy this will be do on a backup version.

If I can't fix it easily by tomorrow then what I will do, rather than delay you any further, is release the combined Chapter One and Two game tomorrow whilst I continue to sort this one out.

The good news, I suppose, is that I'm taking all my problem hits in the first month - although I'll confess it doesn't feel like very good news right now.

Anyhoo! Thanks again for your patience and my apologies once more.