I am today concerned with the various supporting data that the system requires. There are three such files: thing data, character data, and stage data. In times past, I have used a database manager to handle these files, but now they must be integrated into the overall Erasmotron. Yet I am reluctant to write all that database code just yet; it seems a great deal of busywork, and perhaps there are other ways. There is also the problem of merging the data files. This step is fraught with errors; one byte miscounted and the whole thing blows up. Of course, this was always the case. Still, I need to think about the formatting issues. Should I simply concatenate all this data? Let's take a stab at it:
Character records
Stage records
Thing records
Verb records
What about seedstories? I'll leave those out for now. I also need to save the labels of the various custom variables. Perhaps those could be stored in a string at the end.
Gee, I'll need a new name for this type of file; "Verb Data" is no longer descriptive. How about "environment"? "Configuration"? "Setting"? "StoryUniverse"? "StoryWorld"? "Storycosm"? I like this last term.
So here's the strategy: first, I come up with initialization procedures that set all these values to plain vanilla terms. Then I save that file. Then I comment out the file initialization procedure, and build a file loading procedure. Then I build the editor.
Gee, this oughtta be a couple weeks' work.