Bank Boxes and Bugs

Last weekend, my lead programmer finished implementing bank boxes. I kept saying how most RPG's have bank boxes.  For those who do not know about what that means, let me explain.  Characters in computer role playing games often have an inventory where they carry stuff they might need in the course of the game.  That can end up being a lot of items with no real way to organize them.  In addition, in some games, items can be lost upon death or stolen.  Characters may also have a weight or item limit for what they can carry around.  Bank boxes allow characters to put items in them for later usage.  In between adventures, the character can visit the bank box to deposit or take out items.  This bank box can be only accessed in certain usually safe locations, such as towns.  The rest of the time thesse tiesm are not accessable.
Most multi-player online roleplaying games of any size have this feature, so I knew that wograld should have it as well.

I tested the bank boxes and I have not found any bugs with the feature so far.  Unfortunately, I found another serious bug that will have to be fixed before we can even consider a permanent multi-player server.  That is, if you disconnect the client a certain common way, the server will crash.  I have told him to fix that. 

Back to development

I finally had a chance to get back to wograld development.  I was actually ready a couple months agotoget back to work on the project a couple months ago, but I wanted to redo my computer with a new set of distributions on it, so I did that in April.  I got that done, and then I had an awful month in May. My cat got very sick and died, and I also had my car totaled.

June is started out well, I got a chance to test some code, add and remove things from the bug tracker, and commit more artwork.  I can't believe I forgot about the bug tracker for years. I think if I had used it more from the beginning, I would not have to keep track of so many things in the development, particularly in cases where I put the project down for a bit and picked it back up again.
I've been daydreaming about writing a book on free software project development, but then I realize half the information I think should be included in the book, I don't actually know, I could ask someone else, but I'm not sure they would know the answer either.  Also I don't want it to get into too much of an argument, such as what distro is better, what desktop GUI is better or what programming language is better etc.  I know people get very opinionated on these things, I know I do.  I don't want the book to be come across as too biased even though I have strong opinions on those topics too, I know not everyone shares my opinions.

I guess you could ask questions like  Should your project use a bug tracker? Should your project use version control? I guess you can get away with not using them if its a very small project, but I've found anything more than 4-5 files it would probably be better to use version control anyway.  With the bug tracker its nice to keep track of things even if no one else ever reads it, because then you know what you fixed and what you did not fix yet.

Spawning New Developers

Sometimes, it just takes too long to attract new developers to the project so we tried spawning them.  Now that I look back at it, it might have actually been faster to just do it this way all along.  Its very simple, take a male and a female developer, and then mix some genetic code.  Bake in the womb for 9 months, and then train the new little nurseling to like wograld development.  Who knows though, it might not actually work as well as I hoped, because he already fusses during lectures about free software at a certain time of day.
Another problem with this though, is preparing for his arrival took a lot of time away from working on the project.  I also put my web cartoon at www.jastiv.com as a higher priority than working directly on the project, partly because I could see measurable progress every time I worked on it, and also because I ended up making graphics for the web cartoon anyway I could reuse in the game.  The lead programmer has continued to make several commits, but I've really not written much in this space in a while.