Hugh Perkins

Figured out a way to save/load games across game versions.

It’s using the information on this page.

I put in place an architecture so that I my restore and save routines run off the same method, so I won’t accidentally restore xp from the location I saved health to:

[ GlobalSerialize;
xp = Pack( xp );
level = Pack( level );
gold = Pack( gold );
player.serialize();
];

I also assign each object a unique sid, so that changing the game will have no impact on the ability to restore an old game, unless I change a sid – which would be silly! and is easily avoidable – or modify the serialization routines, which might prove easy to violate, but hopefully is avoidable, or workable around.

There is a savefile version, and I make sure that an older game won’t try to load a newer version of the savefile. I will hopefully be able to use this to handle modified serialization routines.

Technically this is not writing at all, but it’s kind of related, since it’s interactive fiction, which is almost related to normal fiction

I built a teeny prototype of using z-code to build a text-based rpg, which can be found at:

simple rpg prototype

It’s fairly easy to write a simple text-based rpg using z-code, but the experience of writing the prototype raised a problem that I can’t solve at the moment: how to handle saving and loading the game?

z-code has inbuilt functions for saving and loading a game, but they won’t load a game saved from a different version of the same game. I tested tweaking the game in different tiny ways, and it refused to load an old savegame file under those circumstances.

I’m sure very few people would want to have to restart an rpg right at the start every time there is some slight tweak to the game!

Finally finished the story I started last Tuesday. It’s based in the Borabo world, only hopefully it’s a little less sexual, and the plot is a little stronger…

It’s hard to write in this imaginative world. It took 21,000 words total of planning in order to produce 6,000 words of story…. Hard work! I thought I would never finish. 7 days of writing for one single story!

Got my second rejection from Clarkesworld Magazine :-/

To be honest, I was kind of expecting this story to be rejected, since it wasn’t really technically sci-fi, but on the other hand I was kind of hoping to get a form rejection, and for that form rejection to be different from my previous rejection.

But it wasn’t.

Were they both “near misses”?

I checked on the Clarkesworld forums.

No, they both received standard form rejections. Crap :-/

On the good side, I guess that means if I do one day get a “near miss”, it will be worth celebrating

I read about half of “Darkness in my Soul” by Dean Koontz.

I felt that the writing style at a per-paragraph, per-sentence level was of a really high quality.

Nevertheless after reading about half-way through I stopped. I’m not sure exactly why.

I liked the premise, I liked the writing, but ….

I feel that possibly it is so chaotic that it just messes with my head.

Warning: spoilers.

The protagonist has these really cool powers, but rather than using them, letting us enjoy seeing him use them, Ploof! straight into some horrible dark scenario.

The people around him are not fun. There is a girl, but we barely glimpse her. She has no personality. She is just a face I feel, in fact, I feel, not even a face. Just a sexual object I feel.

The only person he is almost close to – his boss in fact – is fairly distant I feel. We don’t see them joke together, or go and try to find girls together, or anything.

He has I feel no soul mate. His only possible soul mate appears to be his nemesis. Maybe they get together later in the book, but I’m already half-way through, so it is a bit late for them to get together and hang out for a while though I’m not ruling it out.

I feel I would prefer the book if:
- he had a soul-mate
- he got to use his powers for a bit, have fun, chill out
- and then, at that point, maybe this nemesis comes along

I found the story a little bit too dark, a little bit too cold.

Someone asked me the other day why I joined Critters. Well, I joined to make friends. Not only, but that was a primary goal. How’s it going? Pretty well actually.

The crits one receives are themselves fairly useful, but ultimately, if you receive 20 crits, and some of them say nice things and some of them say that the writing is not worth printing on toilet paper, what do you do? Well, ultimately, you have to make your own mind up about which opinions to listen to most, so really, it boils down to being one’s own judge …

I tried to start making a list of those critters who have given favorable reviews to manuscripts that I have enjoyed, manuscripts not written by me, but there’s a lot of critters, so that hasn’t got very far yet.

I feel that the greatest gift one can give a writer is encouragement. Ultimately, a writer has I feel to write stuff that they enjoy, that gives them personally pleasure, because there is I feel no “magic bullet” to suddenly make someone write brilliantly. There is a fairly surefire to get good, and that is: practice and persistence.

And that is why I feel that the greatest gift one can give a writer is: encouragement.