Day One

Installed Visual Studio 2008 to replace 2005, which has stopped compiling MSI files every week or so. Really annoying, hopefully the upgrade will fix that.

Watched the Human Computation Google talk.

Looked into drag-and-drop with OLE/COM while installer was running. Great tutorial at catch22.net. Stupidly complicated, don't know if it's worth my time to figure out how to use it for the upgraded game editor. I suppose it might be if adding would save editors time adding new content.

Released trade screen update yesterday. Going to clean up code this afternoon and start working on items (not sure what: editor and/or server).


Did a lot of work on serializer class for network messages. Making it really easy to add new functionality. Simple example:

char buffer[512];
typedef BufferSerializer<Array<char>, int, int, int> Message;
Message::writeBuffer(buffer, buffer + 512, &CopiedArray("hello there!"), 1, 2, 3);

Code copies string and numbers into 'buffer'. To read out data again,

char text[128];
size_t text_chars;
int a, b, c;
Message::readBuffer(buffer, buffer + 512, &CopiedArray(text, 128, &text_chars), &a, &b, &c);

Also making classes for TranslatedArray (instead of CopiedArray) so that big structures can be packed down automatically. Nice thing about templates: all of this code gets optimized and inlined.

Finished integrating new serializer into Evidyon. Cleaned out a lot of dead code left over from the Evidyon Alpha 1.0 and even PV days. Housekeeping, etc.