Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Compiler Difficulties

While work on Flexible Survival and its projects has continued, we've run into an unusual series of compiler errors that has required our attention for the last several days.  We are investigating it to the best of our abilities, but its final resolution may be beyond us to solve on our own.  We've contacted the larger Inform community for assistance and will hopefully have better news soon.  We're providing them with details on our findings and the error logs we receive to help locate the core source.

The main gist of our problem seems to be our game somehow overtaxing the compiler, resulting in it adding garbage code to its temporary file and then choking on that same self-made junk.  This occurs during the earliest portions of the compile, before analysis of the code itself begins, so it's very unlikely the fault of anything we wrote - though I won't write that off entirely quite yet.

Fortunately, our Patreon funding has us already working on a revamp of the game into a newer, more modern engine, and this has pushed up the priority of that program.

Unfortunately, the easiest way to circumvent the problem is to remove some content from the game.  As we really don't want to do this, we're doing what we can to find proper solutions to this problem.  I have also taken steps to buy us some breathing space and get the recent commission work active.  At present, the only game content that's been shut off is Omio and her related material.  This was chosen because it was large and pretty much self-contained.  Some other extraneous code was also removed today which shouldn't significantly impact gameplay beyond removing the need for a password to the library computer.

Don't worry, loyal fans, we're not going to stop production on content because of this.  Any commissions we have in the works, Patreon rewards and all the rest will still go ahead as planned.  It may be a little trickier for us to get some material out, but we'll manage as best we can.

I guess there's only so much porn the Inform compiler can take before even it is sated and collapses in a sticky mess of its own making.