iOS version went live today!
Thanks everyone for all your help, suggestions and testing.
All sales proceeds are to feed back to development of The Guild and ultimately remastering of the other Magnetic Scrolls games.
The beta version 1.0.4.4 on testflight is the same binary. Any beta testers let me know if you want a product voucher code as well and i'll look into it.
Comments
raises grubby paw
Excellent, another milestone achieved towards global world domination!
Thanks!
Definitely clears the way for The Guild. Fixing the save games at the moment. From Guild onwards we won't have the annoying difference between the internal save games and the UI saves - it will all be the same (which is nice).
:-)
Uh, just a question.
Will the savegames be versioned to prevent incompatibilities? For example, suppose The Pawn v9 introduces some new features, locations and stuff that previous versions does not have?
Yes indeed. Already, there's a version number, size and CRC. So it's straightforward to make a new version that remains back compatible.
One thing already, it doesn't contain a gameid. That's going to have to go in to prevent loading a save into the wrong game!
It's likely that over time, there will be things that we might want to add to the save game. Something like a built-in help system, for example would be dependent on the game state and therefore we'd need to save it.
And, of course, new stuff. It's always possible that we might want to add some extra content to a game, or perhaps puzzle alternatives.
This reminds me of good old times when I used to load wrong saved files to crash the game and so looking into the computer memory in search of clues..
That's mainly why the original saves were encrypted. The encryption wasn't very good, but they also had checksums. The idea was to prevent people from making random patches to the save games that might either let them cheat or make the game go crazy.
These reasons aren't relevant anymore, but it does have a CRC mainly to protect against data corruption, or a bad file copy.
I think, if you want to cheat, then you can.
In fact there's a "cheat" mode built into the original code. It's real purpose was debugging. It consists of a number of extra "verbs" and various additional bits of information printed out.
I'm wondering whether to leave all this in for the remastered versions.
Leave it in.
OK. It's a deal.
Cool, nice to know we can still try to "cheat" ahem cough
A game into the game!
To make things clearer I now decided to put the score in the save name, e.g. Dragon 140.sav
That's better
That's quite a good idea. Perhaps the save dialog box should make up a suggested name (which you could change of course), of the form: "location_score.sav"
Yes, good suggestion!
Though at least in the desktop version, there's enough empty space that it should be possible to display all that information, and more, outside of the file name. As in this quick mock-up:
vote++
Nice idea, although it would have to read these files to find the additional info OR perhaps they could be part of the name.
Also, there's the problem of when the diaog is not very wide on mobiles.
Nevertheless, i think there's an idea here, at least to try to make the saves more descriptive in some way.