All good over here. The visual side of franchises is done, but I still have my work cut out for me. Because I want to make your old saves compatible with these changes! So let's go, I'll tell you all about it right away!
This week's recap
Every time I write this section title, I hesitate: should it be "recap" or "weekly summary"... Yeah, not interesting, sorry, I didn't get much sleep.
Anyway, this week I worked on the interface. You can now rename a console while it's in development. You asked for it, so there you go. Once it's released, the name is final. No more changes.
A player reported a bug they were getting when launching the game: a massive freeze that kept them from playing. Here's the thing: when City Game Studio starts, it sends an HTTP request to fetch the list of my other games. And for some players, that request never completed. Normally, the request is supposed to time out. Except here, it didn't. So I added a 5-second timeout, after which the request is canceled and the game carries on.
I also finished defining the franchise interface. We know exactly what it's going to look like. But I'd rather keep it a secret now that I've gotten all your feedback on the last design. Don't worry, it hasn't changed much and it should look pretty much like what you've already seen. Anyway, to display franchises you need data, and that data needs to be compiled. You don't want City Game Studio to start listing and organizing all your games every single time you open the franchise panel.
So right now I'm working on a model (it's already created) that will let City Game Studio compile franchise data. With this model, City Game Studio will display the information quickly: instead of recompiling it every time, it will have a link to each game and an association with each franchise. I'm doing it this way mainly for performance reasons.
What's next
Now this model needs to be populated with your games' data. And that means save migrations. There will need to be one migration for each type of game, port, DLC... Needless to say, there's a lot of work ahead of me. I've already started, but there's so much data to compile that it's going to take me a good while. And I'm sorry to say this, but in the meantime, franchises won't be available. I'd rather do things in order. First, the migrations. Then, the controller that will compile data for the games you develop during a playthrough. And finally, I'll plug the model into the interface.
Which means that over the next few weeks, your saves will get a bit bigger (not by much), but you won't see anything new in the interface.
Anyway, that's it for me, thanks for reading.
See you next week, and in the meantime, take care
Xavier aka Binogure
