I wrote a suprising amount of code this weekend but didn't actually get very far. I ran in to a problem with streaming in maps over a few game frames.

Basically the problem is: What should we do until the map is streamed in?

It was problem I had known about but forgotten. Anyway instead of sitting back and coming up with something elegant, I thought: just wait I can hack this together!

So I closed my eyes and bashed away at the keyboard and after a few false starts I had skeleton maps in place. They took all the information a normal map needs and stored it. Then when the normal map was read in from the disk it could update itself from the skeleton.

I think it's a bit messy the way I've done it but the general idea is okay.

Then I needed some code that handled the problem of shutting down while a map is being streamed to the disk or from the disk. That wasn't too hard. I just put some code in the closing event and then had it pass the message down to my other game objects. The load queue gets cleared and the save queue is run until it's empty -> Saving everything to the disk.

And finally I've been using Sunbird for project management. Yes I know it's totally inappropiate but all the other stuff seems to require a web server and I have problems getting PHP and IIS to play together nicely. Also sunbirds in very early development and it has bugs and it's slow as dead, rotting, buried horse. But that's all an aside basically I've add a daily task to doing a piece of sprite art. (Though for some reason it doesn't seem to appear everyday - bah). So this weekend I drew two frames of a eyeball monster and a sword. The sword is possibly too shiny, the eyeball monster is okay I think it's something that it's quite hard to do wrong.