Dev Diary #24

Hey guys,

Today the Director took a big step forward. Its inner machinations are now, for the moment, fully functional. It passes all of our tests and has what I believe to be solid and readable syntax that we've designed to be as readable and easy-to-use as possible while still allowing very advanced usage possibilities.

I've already begun writing 'dry run' scenes in order to start populating a list of good tags that we know will be used. The next stage is to start building those internal libraries, but that will happen naturally as we go forward and as I write more scenes. We have all the framework in place for doing that, so each label should be a case of entering it into the SymbolResolver and pointing it at the relevant in-game data. The next big step will be to create the highly customisable player body data structure, so that we have dicks and boobs to point it at for scenes. We already have a decent amount of work into that.

Furthermore, as I've been writing, I've also been tweaking a customised syntax highlighting scheme for our Director language, using Notepad++ in order to make writing with the Director a lot nicer. It's based on Monokai and I think it looks tasty. Really helps with spotting errors and making everything clear as I write. I'll make it publicly available once we're at the stage where we're accepting writing (which draws closer!)

If you'd like to see our tests and check out the Director syntax, as well as see the sheet of results, here they are:

Tests: Pastebin link.

Results: Pastebin link.

The Director reads raw text files and prints raw text files. Keep in mind that these are not supposed to be human-readable, they're just for testing purposes, so don't panic if it all looks confusing. All tests except edge cases are supposed to return the specified number of PASSes if they're working correctly (which is sometimes zero).

Lastly, here's a look at Director syntax with my highlighting scheme. Juicy.

Personally I'm thrilled to finally see my neat little idea working. Our Dev team did amazing work on this. It does its job, and it does it really, really efficiently (I believe it generates exactly one string to memory, total. One of the team might slap and correct me, but either way it's very, very low on memory usage). For the next bi-weekly update I'll aim to get a brief description of how this all works and why it'll be awesome for writers.

Oh, and, a couple of us have been putting further work into the private wiki. No ETA on the public version yet, but it's coming along nicely.

Until next time!