Digging through the game

I don't think that's the captain's real name :/ (I'm off by about 190 bytes)

So yesterday I went MIA to help retrieve family members for an airport. While coming back my motivation was hampered because I can't seem to get a block of data loaded correctly. The problem I'm coming across is I have a struct with member that points to the struct. (Meaning it's circular). It's not a linked list. It appears to be just a pointer, but I'm getting all kinds of byte alignment issues manually unrolling it. It's getting super frustrating to see the wrong data being read from the wrong part of the file It wouldn't be so bad, but this file is 6K and some of the data inside has variable lengths, such as the planet data or the captain's dossiers. After my airport jaunt I didn't feel like pushing bytes around and today I got up late and felt like it even less. I gave it a shot, made my structs even worse,  I basically spend the day reorganizing my Japanese Magic: The Gathering collection from 1994.

Today was a bad day. I feel terrible I haven't been making any progress and it's creating a feedback loop of motivation. However after leaving my blog for two days, I had an uptick of people looking in on it. I guess looking for a post that didn't come.

I'm here. It's going.

This is a thing that needs to get fixed. I'm solving two problems at once. I feel the is really the final hurdle of core functionality before I go on to making things pretty and stable. (Not necessarily in that order)

I'm also thinking of extending the demo system to add commentary bubbles to give it a tutorial feel. Maybe. For now I'll concentrate more on trying not to load names from the missile inventory data.

Counting bytes and aligning them to the structs. I have 6K of this...