electionguard-cpp VS pataro

I started off by trying to recreate the problem with another program I was working on, ElectionGuard, which was where I first encountered CPM. I set an empty environment variable for CPM_SOURCE_CACHE and tried building it, but I didn't get any errors related to CPM because I realized the MakeFile's definition of CPM_SOURCE_CACHE was overriding the one I set. I changed this to be empty and tried again, but it still built with no CPM issues.

Aside from Pataro, I've been poking at ElectionGuard and CPM.cmake as well. Both of them are pretty much at the same status, which is - built and ready to be worked on - but the logic of how to do so completely eludes me.

The first I worked on was ElectionGuard, which is an SDK that performs ballot encryption and verification functions for digital elections. I've been trying to build it for a few days now but had been unsuccessful so far. I started by installing GNU Make, Chocolatey, and MSYS2. I went through a lot of trial and error with CMake, including erroneously thinking my build worked when I searched for a .sln and found an included one that ended up being in C#. I eventually got Ninja as well which was listed as a requirement somewhere, and with all the tools in place I gave it another shot.

I have started working again on Pataro (GitHub), my modern C++ implementation of the C++ roguelike tutorial on RogueBasin.

Today I'm back to working on Pataro, the roguelike built on libtcod that made up much of my Hacktoberfest efforts. I had been assigned to an issue requesting the addition of serialization and deserialization, but unfortunately ran out of time and wasn't able to finish the former or start the latter. I ran into issues with Cereal, and had a hard time figuring out the structure of the program and how to go about implementing serialization for all the relevant components. At the end of that attempt I mentioned that if I were to try again I'd start by testing out Cereal separately and getting a handle on that before trying to implement it in Pataro - so that's what I'm doing today.

I am once again working on Pataro today, and I've succeeded in clearing up some issues and creating new ones. I've been stuck on an issue where Visual Studio was raising errors in the portion of the code where I call the cereal archive on some types, but was able to clear up that issue by moving the save function definitions out of their respective headers and into the corresponding .cpp files. Examining this repo and its use of cereal again, I was able to get a bit clearer of an idea of how it's implemented, and I included just about every relevant cereal header I could find to try and avoid any issues like the previous one popping up again (with the intention of later removing whichever I can to avoid redundant inclusions).

On the Pataro front, I've started looking at other examples of people using cereal for their games. It seems to be a popular choice for roguelike games like this, so hopefully I can figure out both the syntax problems I'm facing, as well as logical ones like how the program should be structured to have all the necessary data properly serialized and deserialized.

Progress on one front but roadblocks on another. After my post yesterday outlining my plans to add serialization to Pataro I ran into some issues with calling the archive class in cereal wherein the call wouldn't go through due to an incorrect number of arguments. This happened with both vector and size_t data members, and I'm still investigating why.

One of the biggest problems I've faced while tackling this has been figuring out the structure of the program. I've never worked on a game before so the structure of how all the different pieces fit together is alien to me, but I've been slowly figuring it out over the past days and weeks. After getting in touch with the developer of (Pataro)[https://github.com/SuperFola/pataro] and reading tutorials on developing with (libtcod)[https://github.com/libtcod/libtcod] I think I have a better idea of how to approach it.

This month I'm working on participating in Hacktoberfest, starting with contributing to a roguelike game called Pataro built on the libtcod roguelike development library. I chose to work on adding a serialization mechanism to save the player's progress and so far it's involved a lot of new and challenging processes. I haven't completed my work yet but wanted to start sharing progress on my learning and status.

Note: I implemented this pattern here, and they are executed here.