Updates

I've made a few additions over the last week or so, figured it's worth a quick post to list some of the bigger points.

Zones now exist and act as collections for levels, storing the information needed to generate them as needed, along with the information to link them together.   I've worked through the basic functionality to create levels and transition between them via LevelLinks (aka stairs, hatches, etc) through player interaction.  Along with this came several fixes related to cleaning up Levels for deletion and it looks like there's definitely more work to be done here, but for now the basic framework is in place and working.  It was a slightly magical moment the first time I worked out the last kinks and was able to travel back and forth between levels repeatedly...

As I mentioned in the previous post, entering the data for the starting zone exposed some limitations of my data file parsing system.  So I ended up spending a fair bit of time shoring this up and cleaning up some annoyances that had been bothering me for a while.  First and foremost was simplifying the declaration of properties for serialization to make it less error prone and more readable.

The old way (with lots of snipping):

REGISTER_TYPE(ACreatureClass)
void ACreatureClass::DefineProperties(ObjectType *Type, Property *LastProperty)
{
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY_STRUCT(ACreatureClass,TextCell,Cell));
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY_STRUCT(ACreatureClass,Range_Int,BaseHealth));
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY(ACreatureClass,float,BaseEvasion));
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY(ACreatureClass,int,BaseMovementSpeed));
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY_CUSTOM(ACreatureClass,String,BrainTypeName));
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY(ACreatureClass,int,BaseSightRadius));
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY_OBJECT(ACreatureClass,AWeapon,StartingWeapon));
ADD_PROPERTY(CREATE_PROPERTY_ARRAY_EXT(ACreatureClass,ItemBodySlotDesc,BodySlots,CREATE_PROPERTY_STRUCT(ACreatureClass,ItemBodySlotDesc,BodySlots)));
}

And the new way:

REGISTER_TYPE(ACreatureClass)
CREATE_PROPERTY_STRUCT(TextCell,Cell)
CREATE_PROPERTY_STRUCT(Range_Int,BaseHealth)
CREATE_PROPERTY(float,BaseEvasion)
CREATE_PROPERTY(int,BaseMovementSpeed)
CREATE_PROPERTY_STRING(BrainTypeName)
CREATE_PROPERTY(int,BaseSightRadius)
CREATE_PROPERTY_OBJECT(AWeapon,StartingWeapon)
CREATE_PROPERTY_ARRAY_STRUCT(ItemBodySlotDesc,BodySlots)
END_REGISTER_TYPE(ACreatureClass)

I've also added a property type for referencing data types, which will make a safer replacement for the string lookups I've been using (BranTypeName, ClassName, etc).  Array properties also received some bolstering, making it possible to access properties by index and support for referencing inline other property definitions which comes in handy when you just need to touch one property of an object stored in base type's array.

At the moment I'm focusing on getting saving to disk working so I can have some sort of persistence in this game.  So far I've written a basic file writer and a debug command to test the property system; the remaining work doesn't seem that far off now.  Looks like the biggest problem to solve next is how to convert pointers into some sort of lookup table that I can safely save off and then rebuild on load when needed.