Sunday, January 6, 2008

Happy New Year!

Well, I didn't get EverHarvest released before Christmas (would have made for a great Christmas, for all of us) - but I have made a great deal of progress in the previous weeks. I'm close to a release, matter of fact - lots of changes, for the better, to the macro engine, and to the state machine itself. No longer does it require such a long pause at the start for 'initialization,' which is probably the best part. Also the saving and loading of walkpaths has become quite fast as I switched from human-editable walkpath datafiles to compiled datafiles. This makes editing walkpaths manually impossible, unfortunately, but I didn't see much capacity for manual editing anyway as walkpaths typically get quite huge.

Anyway - with the release of EverHarvest looming ever-so-near on the horizon (by the end of the week, in fact), the question is now starting to focus on what must be done about Evercraft. Some of you have noted that Evercraft's performance of late has suffered, mostly due to an incompatibility on Windows XP between Evercraft and .NET 3.0/3.5. Well, the answer to that problem is here - I have just posted an announcement on the Macrocrafter.com forums revealing our plans for the development of Evercraft 6, which will be written using the .NET Framework 3.5 and Autocrat 3.5 (which is in use in EverHarvest).

I'm excited. =) Evercraft 6 is going to be a massive improvement over EC5 (which itself was a massive improvement over EC4), and is going to allow us to do soooo much more with the system. We're going to build it from the ground up with extensibility and maintenance in mind, so recovering from changes (like RoK) will be a piece of cake. Also we'll be able to add new functionality to the system to do things Evercraft has never been able to do before. I'll expand on that later. *devilish laugh*

So - that's this month's update... heh - no, seriously - I'll update more frequently as I get the chance.

TTFN. =)