There are now no more compile errors. It took just under 5 months to fix 75,000+ errors, giving me a fix rate of 15,000 per month (500 a day). Not bad for something I only worked on in my spare time on a “as I feel like it” basis.
After the compile errors were squashed, there were 922 warnings. It’s a bad idea to ignore warnings because there’s a pretty good chance they’ll just end up as runtime errors. I went through and squished as many as I could as fast as I could, and the warning total is down to 28. Those are (mostly) harmless.
Now begins stage 3: Getting the game to run without errors.
This might be pretty involved, since I wasn’t able to test any of my rewritten code thanks to all those compile errors. Right now I’m hammering out the glitches in the new network code (and I’ve already fixed a few).
Stage 4: Once I have the codebase in a runnable state I’ll have to convert over all of the area and data files. You know how I converted everything to save and load XML files? Well, the old areas aren’t XML yet. I’ll have to write a converter application to do this.
Stage 5: Debug the whole thing. Stage 3 debugging is easy since the game doesn’t *DO* anything without areas, mobs, and equipment loaded. Stage 5 is where every command has to be tested, and it’ll be pretty involved. This might be where it makes sense to set up a test server so other people can play around with it and help find problems.