Day 85

Programming Tip of the Day: If your sprite isn't rendering, try actually adding it to the screen!

I got a new server yesterday to replace the one that used to house my trac and SVN repository. I installed Ubuntu on it and tried to upgrade, only to find that this is taking forever. Turns out a new version came out mere hours before my server arrived. Not only was the install I had out of date, but due to everyone hammering the servers, it'll take forever to get up to date!

This gave me extra time to think about the blog post I made. I sat down with an actual honest-to-gods pen and paper and drew what I wanted the mission editor to look like. Then I was like "Hey, I can do that! And it'd be hugely useful to other objects, too!"

Thus, I introduce #117: THE MINIBUILDER!

As terrifyingly powerful as the old build dialog, but bite-sized!

All the functionality isn't there yet. I was halfway through writing up the subclass that would deal specifically with adding/removing weapons from ships (they have special methods to do this) when I thought to myself: Haven't I done this before?

Yes, I have. I made special subclasses of the old builder to handle weapons for ships... and cargo for ships... and addons for ships. The way ships handle them is different from the way planets handle them is different from the way that you'd just throw them in a list. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, to have a unified API and then just adapt anything that doesn't conform to it?

Thus I created an Adapter class! It has an 'add_item', a remove_item, an 'items', and a 'constraint' (the type that goes into the list). I only have to write a 'Adding weapons to ships' subclass once instead of for every GUI element that does so. How useful, I thought! Then I went online to make sure I was spelling the word 'Adapter' correctly and discovered that my invention already exists and is a pattern. I still felt proud, having independently discovered it.

My server is currently formatting a 500GB disk whose reliability has been called into question. Thus I'm formatting it with the most slow and careful of bad-block checks. I do not recommend this unless you have a great deal of time on your hands, it's taken nearly 24 hours now. Still, if the disk is dodgy, this will find out. And if this doesn't break it, nothing will.