Travel Mostly Complete :)

So I finished all of the US cities, but there are still three countries' worth of cities to do - the UK, Canada and Mexico. I'm having trouble finding a good Mercator projection of North America or of Canada with enough detail to let me match it to US cities. And same thing with Mexico. I haven't even tried the UK yet, but I did get the US done, so I'm going to punt for the time being on the others. It was a LOT of work and I have something even if it's not completely what I want to have done before final release. I'll add bugs (first ones!) to document that I still need to add some places in Europe and finish Canada, Mexico, and the UK.

On the plus side, I did get a good mapping done of the US cities. I ended up missing some state capitals (how that happened I'll never know), but I did have them plus some other one cities in the mix. It's a bit sparse in areas, but it should still work.

I've kind of decided that for the magic school I'm going to simply disallow travel for players who are under 5th level. This will keep them in the same location and prevent it from being a major problem. I'm also going to remove them from duel lists (and remove 5th and higher from their duel lists) when playing. They'll still be able to chat with other people in the area and go on quests, but they won't be able to duel anyone who's not still in school. :) I was only thinking about it because of the whole travel thing. I'm thinking I'm going to do the pruning of player lists on the device rather than limit the select statement on the server side. The fewer restrictions I can place on the server selects the better. :)

So, I'm calling travel complete with some bugs to fix. *sigh* I just need to get a few hours some time in the next few days to finalize those linkages and fix the UK which is like 30 cities. I just can't bring myself to do that right now. :)

Onward and upward, then!

Travel Progress

I did get everything on the app side working with traveling - finally! I can move around and things worked as expected. Except that I found major problems with the data file. *sigh* What I had originally done was to find the latitude and longitude of all of the cities in my list and then I went through to calculate the differences between it and other cities nearby to determine the cardinal directions. What I found though is that while I did pretty well in many cases I was WAY off in others. So I found a Mercator projection map of the US (which is what I'm going to start with for now) and I'm going through all of the US cities (I have about 75) and get them corrected. There are a couple of places where it'll seem a little weird, but is correct. For instance, you might be able to go southeast from a city, but the northwest from that city doesn't lead you back where you were but to a different city. So from a directional map perspective it might seem odd, but it works out. :)

My task today is to finish fixing the data file. And mowing the lawn. And cutting the suckers in the backyard (which is becoming like a fairy forest for lack of care). If I can get the data file fixed then I can move onto wands and spells. And while there is definitely a programmatic method for fixing this, I'm actually finding it a good mental exercise to do it by hand. Not so good for the carpal tunnel, though. :(

Also - here's a photo of the travel pane with some locations in it. If you're interested. :)

Success

Well, it took both more and less time to fix the problem than I expected. :) I had thought that I would resolve it quickly last night and when I couldn't, I thought it would take longer than it did this morning to rectify. So things are moving along well. There seem to be some errors in transcription for the XML document. An example would be that it seems possible to move West from Providence to Concord, NH. Um - not quite. :) So I need to get some testers hitting the various destinations and seeing whether the list matches the one I generated and then whether the list I generated is logical and accurate. So there's a validation of the generated list and a verification of matching real life. Just need some testers (that would be a general call for anyone willing to participate, by the way :).

I've got a defect tracking system up and running for the project. I've decided on CodeTrack versus Bugzilla as BZ was a bit difficult to setup, surprisingly. CodeTrack was a breeze and provides more capabilities than I need. I will need to refresh myself on Apache authentication and authorization, though. It's one of those things that I don't do frequently enough to bother storing in long-term memory. :)

So, I'm feeling good about how things are going, but I'm really concerned about the deadline at this point. Still need artwork, still need a database, still need to write the server-side scripts to access and modify the database, etc. Just so much left to do and the clock is ticking loudly. C'est la vie, or so they say.

Travel Update

So it's been a reasonably productive day ending on something of a sour note. I've put the destinations for the game (North America and the UK) into an XML file that I'm able to pull from the website and parse properly. But now I've run into an issue where I'm getting a crash when I try to move from the main location. When I first had things working it was going about five spaces away before I'd get a crash. I thought it might have been a problem with no releasing some objects properly, so I've done that and now it crashes on the first move. Obviously the releases weren't the issue. It's unfortunately too late now for me to think clearly and get anything resolved properly, so I'm going to sleep on it and see what I can find out tomorrow morning.

Artwork is still not being done and I need to get that moving forward. I've talked with a couple of people who might be interested and able to do the work, but I need to finalize that and get them cracking on it. Things are in a place now where they could probably do at least half of the artwork right now and the rest in the not-too-distant future. *sigh*

Overall, I'm happy with the progress being made. I'm a little behind where I'd hoped to be, but honestly things are going faster than I expected they would. Toss in two weeks where very little was possible (due to Princess Ida), and the progress is actually amazing. :) Perhaps things will be clearer in the morning. There's still SOOOOO much to overall, though, that even if I had everything done right now I'd be hard-pressed to get the game released by the end of the month. Right now the best I can hope is that I can get it into an alpha/very-early-beta by the end of the month. That means that I won't likely be right there when Harry Potter opens, but that I might be within a week of the release, and that would be pretty cool.