Some updates and progress

[WildWeazel]

Hi folks, I wanted to share a few high level updates.

First to acknowledge my recent lack of posting. My wife has been unwell for the past month and I've done a lot of caretaking. We're okay, it's just cut into my free time, and my work schedule, which in turn cuts into my free time. I've fallen behind in some of the discussions. But you'll see I haven't been totally idle.

A side note before getting into things, I propose a shorthand for our 4-ish strategic options:

• "Build It" (new game)
• "Patch It" (reverse engineering)
• "Adapt It" (open source or TOTPP modification)
• "Support It" (BIQ/SAV tools)

As you've probably gathered from Puppeteer's updates we've advanced Build It to the prototyping stage, based on Godot and his previous experiments. He and Quintillus and I met and decided that it justified putting in some real work. Our next milestone is to demonstrate some technical points of interest in a throwaway prototype. It won't be a playable game and will only vaguely resemble Civ3, but will help us understand what we're getting ourselves into. If anyone else would like to see the code or contribute at this point I can give you access to the repo on GitHub. In the meantime we'll keep showing off what we can do.

Now this isn't the official declaration that we've chosen Build It, yet. These paths have parallel gates and "C7" has passed through one. Flintlock is further ahead still with Patch It since he has actually produced something. Those two seem to be the front-runners so far.

I've previously mentioned having notes in a design document which is where this all began. I put off sharing it because it was not in a very useful condition, but I've finally decided I've spent more than enough time on it even though it's incomplete. The result is mostly an outline of how to Build It. It's probably more information that anyone needs right now but I might as well put it out there. I'm going to post it in the New Game Engine thread and highlight the points of interest.

The next thing I'd like to tackle, now that some differently skilled programmers have joined us, is characterizing what we think we can and cannot do with Patch It vs the other options. It was not well understood or favored at first, but Flintlock is clearly having success with the patch framework and turning out features at an impressive pace.