June 29th, 2011
Tragedy. I’m writing this from Windows Safe Mode. The other day, while reading through a pdf of Preacher and listening to some music, my computer froze (karma for procrastinating on that collision fix?), and I’ve not been able to get it to boot normally since. A CHKDISK freezes about a quarter of the way into it, defrag won’t make it past the initial analysis, and the bios memory checker says there’s no problem. A system restore didn’t fix anything, and the event logger had something about a faulty file structure at the time of the crash. I’m going to have to reformat and restore to factory conditions. Hopefully I can find someone with an external hard drive who will let me back up my documents, music, and programming stuff. I’ll just have to eat most of my games as losses; most of them were installed off of Steam back when I had an internet connection.
Also, I’ve decided on a rework of the physics engine, based more off of the enemy collisions. I think once it’s done that it will look more natural and be easier to work with. I just have to take care of the overall computer issue first.
Edit: No reformat necessary! I loaded up in safe mode, made a list of all the services that were “necessary,” disabled all but those, and then loaded windows normally. Using the windows console, I re-enabled the services one at a time until I found the offender, something called SuperFetch (used to improve access to memory locations). After disabling it (and a lot of other useless crap), all is back to normal. Now, time to get back to work.
To do:
1) Fix player collision detection
2) Finish coding in all the Japan enemy behaviors
3) Health and weapons
4) Code a top-down engine for the waking sequences
5) Work on modularizing the code so that japan-enemies have a file separate from other-world-enemies
6) Code all other enemy behaviors