My work this week has been the repetitive and somewhat tedious task of rewriting the code for Mission 1. It did take a while, but hardly the entire month my original schedule called for! My original schedule didn’t anticipate that I would finish the entire game within GSoC, but at this rate, it seems quite possible.
Anyway, this week’s work speaks for itself: the first mission is fully playable in ScummVM. There are just a handful of animation errors and default interactions missing (ie. using a tricorder on something when no “action” is defined for that).
Something I struggled with this week was text handling, keeping in mind that I’ll eventually want to port the French and German versions to scummvm as well. Before, that would have been extremely difficult due to the way I was hardcoding text into the code, so I switched to a system where each piece of text is referenced by a constant integer value; this will make it easy to support other languages later. And, as it turns out, almost every piece of text already has a unique “name” in the form of the corresponding audio filename, so this system was actually pretty easy to implement.
Instead of going straight to mission 2 next, I’ll be taking a break from mission-specific logic by looking into the saving system next. It’s sorely needed to make testing easier.