Have now:
- had more human beta-testing and incorporated the feedback (of which there was not a huge amount)
- removed the Conversation Builder extension and commented out a lot of the support code from the main game file, so that what remains now in the game is only the material that is intended for the final release
- done a little more streamlining, getting rid of the remaining procedural rules in the hope that that would bump the speed a little. (It doesn’t seem to have done a huge amount, but it was worth a try.)
- sent off the source code for further profiling: there is a particular slowdown when disambiguating the names of quips that I still have not been able to optimize away
Meanwhile, David Kinder has been working on Git and Glulx, using Alabaster as a benchmark project, and it looks like it will be able to speed things up a lot at the interpreter level as well.
Still outstanding before release:
- find out results of profiling; tweak to improve if possible
- add artwork, if same comes through
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 