A Decidedly Unsettling Discovery

I was executing the complicated process of reverting the Siboot storyworld to the earlier system with the many stages. Some of the work I could do in the SWAT stage editor, but some of the work required me to dig straight into the XML file that holds the story world to restore elements that had not been present in my backup version. This proved to be a tricky operation, but fortunately my text editor, Text Wrangler, is excellent and has a feature for comparing two versions of a document, identifying differences, and permitting you to easily transport different sections from one version to the other, without otherwise touching anything else. That made life much easier.

But during this process I discovered that some of the values of personality attributes had been altered. This is very bad news; I really need the personalities to be stable. My guess is that these values were changed by a test run of the engine. That’s not supposed to happen; when the engine runs, it is supposed to set aside a virgin compy of the storyworld and use another version for the actual engine run. That way, when the engine has finished running and the user is ready to save the storyworld, the changes that were made during the engine run are not incorporated into the saved version. That’s how it is supposed to work. 

But that’s not happening. But I have no way of knowing just when these changes were made; they could have been made as much as a year ago. So now I have a new problem: is there something screwy about the save-file process? The engine-run process? The debugging system? The rehearsals? 

At this point I don’t think it’s worthwhile to spend the time researching all of this. However, I may well want to keep my own virgin copy of the portion of the XML file that saves the personality traits. Just in case.

I am now resuming the slow process of getting a conversation operational. It now handles word entry and sentence completion, but there’s something wrong with the followup steps. Back to the salt mines.