Day 83

I'd like to introduce a feature to this blog that I use at work quite a bit. It's called the Programming Tip of the Day, and it's for when I've made bone-headed mistakes. In Ruby, if you have a method like this:

def check
  self.doImportantStuffHere
end

And then later in that same class you have a method like this:

def check
end

The second one takes precedence. Thus today's Programming Tip of the Day: If nothing's happening, make sure the method where stuff happens isn't being overwritten.

Today's major task was getting the mission cycle complete; I have a unit test which awards the player a mission (by asking the mission if it's appropriate and, if so, telling it to give itself to the player) and then tells that same mission to check to see if it's done. Given that the sole condition for completion is that the player be in the starting sector, it is done. This same check will automatically do any attached actions which, in this case, complete the mission.

I started work on the next action/condition group, which is to set and check 'flags'. The player has a set of flags which are essentially a big dictionary of key (the :tag of the flag) value (a string or number) pairs. Their intent is to be used in multi-leg missions: If you want the player to go from A to B to C, you set a flag when they get to B and then when they get to C check it to see if they jumped through the extra hoop.

I'm also trying out the google syntax highlighter for my code snippets above. We'll see how that turns out.

EDIT: Poorly!