HoHH1.5 Release - v0.014

And the new release is ready.

This is an internal re-organisation release to ease me back into hacking code again after taking a couple of months off to get the new book out. And also to stabilise the codebase so I can get back to adding new features without worrying about random things breaking. As such, it's not too exciting for players as it's more of a "just check it's working the same as before" releases.

I'd gotten a little too cavalier with some changes, so this release was to get everything stabilised and locked down, so I can build off it. Mainly it was about getting all my various individual module tests working again.

The main change is to tidy up how the data is initialised. For a long time this was all done in the StoryInit passage, so everything would be in place on start-up. This was fine for when everything was reset on the player starting a new run, but not so fine when I needed to preserve notebook data across different runs.

What I've done is move the data initialisation out of StoryInit and separated it between persistent data (eg notebook data on harlots) that needs to be preserved between runs and the standard run data that is reset at the beginning of each new game. Everything is initialised on start-up, but only the standard run data is re-initialised at the start of a new game. It's pretty basic stuff, but I needed it to be cleaned up in the code.

While it is mainly for the harlot notebook data, the codebase is now set up so that I can manage persistent data for other things. Examples of this are extending the notebook to track information learned about the various charms or faction lore. It should also make it easier to create a first tutorial run to explain the mechanics of the game and stagger the introduction of the various NPCs. It should now be easier to implement these in the future.

The other thing it should help with is backward compatability with saves. This was something that was worrying me. Eventually HoHH is going to be stable enough that people are going to want to keep their current saves. I'm still going to be adding new harlots, but I don't want to force players to start again with a new save every time there is an update. This is now less scary as most of the data is reset at the beginning of a new run (a new visit to the House with a new character), which means it should reset with the new additions. This is something I still need to implement, but it's no longer quite as daunting as I feared it would be.

Currently v0.014 should play the same as v0.013. I'm still in the middle of adding notebook and autosave functionality, so not all of the harlots will have it. The main purpose is to get it out and have people check it to make sure nothing is broken.

Not the most exciting, I know, but necessary.

I've attached it here as a .zip file (unzip it and run the .html file in your default browser). I've also updated the houseofhellishharlots website. You can find the new version by clicking the Private Demo button on this page.

The new password is: r1Bb0n.

Try it out and let me know if you run into any problems.