A setback, and starting with new things...

So I spent most of last week working out some way to effectively change the resolution of FFVI without having to quit and restart. You see the issue is that with the Irrlicht Engine, you cannot dynamically change the resolution and everything will be fine. You have to actually properly shut down the IrrlichtDevice and create a new one with a different resolution setting.

I spent about 3 or 4 days working some code in to make sure everything that needed to know the device was going to change, knew.. but it started getting to the point where I was writing a hack to make a hack work so it would hack another hack into making the whole thing work. Not even close to clean. I can deal with some hacks, as they tend to be temporary, but this was just getting rediculous, and I knew some of them just couldn't possibly be temporary.

So I scrapped everything I had done in that direction and looked at it from a different perspective after taking a small break. In a matter of 2 nights, I wrote up a new means thru which to not only effectively, but CLEANLY do what I wanted to, and I proceeded to work out all the memory leaks, and all now looks well^^ I'm quite happy with how my code turned out.

After that, I went thru my to-do list, cleaning up a buncha stuff that got dirty while I was doing all this, and got back down to the major points on the list again. The 2 things that really stuck out was to go back thru my code and fix everything that I had left notes to myself to fix, and to implement a means thru which the various menu items could actually DO something. (Technically, the latter is a member of the former, but ah well...) This menu item action thing is actually the last piece I need to implement to have 100% of my previous code working again, but it's actually going to take a bit before I get them working again, as I'm going to do it properly this time.

And the new thing! I am now writing a virtual machine to execute external scripts. These scripts will be specific to FFVI3D, but will be easy enough to figure out. They'll likely be in a similar style to BASIC, but I might go so far as to make them feel more like C/++.. Not that any of this will matter to the player, but it'll be a LOT easier for when I get around to putting some events/ingame cutscenes/etc.. in. I'll also be using scripts to define what each menu item will do when selected. But I really haven't gotten far into this yet, so I'll update later on it.