Saturday, April 26, 2008

Warum hast Du nichts getan?

Well I wouldn't say that! I've done something, it just hasn't been that major in the grand scheme of things.

Ok, first up. The big three and a half month gap, what's with that? Well, various things happened in my actual life which slowed down development somewhat. I guess shit like that happens, but everyone's all the better for it. In a topsy-turvy period of potential house moves (I didn't in the end) and television purchasing (I did), it was pretty hard to find the time to sit down and really get stuck into the meat of the game. My mind, sadly, was elsewhere.

As seems to be the case, when I finally got back into the swing of things I've been refactoring. This game's been in development for longer than some national football teams have existed (I'm looking at you, Saarland) and so some parts are much older than others, coded using methods that have long since been bettered, and there comes a time when trying to extend the old code to provide new functionality becomes so tiresome that it would be more beneficial to rewrite it. I've said this before. Maybe this is why the game hasn't been finished...

So where once I had working competitions and league systems, now I have nothing but shells. Thankfully, pace has picked up a fair bit over the last few weeks and things are really thundering on, so I've made plenty more progress and I'm far happier working with the new code. Improvements have been made to a few areas and everything's so much cleaner.

I've got some targets now, targets I'd like to hit. However, I know for a fact that if I mention them here I'll never hit them, so I'll just keep them to myself. Needless to say the next one needs to be hit by Monday night or GTA is going to delay everything.

At least I still have Simon Read to keep me working on my GUI system, FryGUI. He has taken that module and done some great things with it in the latest in the New Star Soccer series, and he's been ever vigilant in finding bugs and recommending new features. NSS3 is certainly one of my favourite football games, NSS4 is coming along as a leap forward that's every bit as large as the leap from the second game, so get over there and take a look.