I'm working on the new face display and am trying to figure out just how much of the old system I want to preserve. I could just build a C++ conversion of the original Pascal code, and then begin to modify it as necessary. Or I could start all over and build something from scratch. Which to do?
There's an awful lot of work in that original face technology; it seems stupid to throw it away. But it's old, old code and needs a housecleaning.
There's so much work in all this, I think that for now I will just try to bring up an exact replica of the old code in C++, and then start modifying it from there.
On a completely different subject, I just got off the phone with Laura Mixon, and she had some complaints that led to a great new idea: a provision for test scenarios. These are single threads that put a character through some simple test, the better to assess the personality of the character &emdash; as well as to test the robustness of the thread. We need to restrict the test to a two-character interaction, and we need to rule out historical searches. The two people in the thread must have no history between them. But it would provide an excellent intermediate step for the novice storybuilder.