It’s done – objects save and load as XML data rather than some ad-hoc text format. I’m sure there will be a few extra details to work out, but the saving and loading of basic objects works now. The change cleared up a bug or two that would come up once in a while due to formatting inconsistencies.
I still have to fix the violence update problem that I mentioned on the 1st. I’ve tried a few minor changes in the hope that the problem would be resolved, but it really does look like a full combat-process rewrite is in order. The original method is fundamentally flawed, so we need to work out a better way.