Day 86

Programming Tip of the Day: There is a difference between '=' and '=='.

If you take a look back to yesterday's entry you might notice something about the minibuilder. Specifically, there are two entries in it that look almost the same: "wpn_lazor" and "wpn_lazor:2279". What that second one means is that it's been duplicated from the original wpn_lazor. That's the intended behavior; ships' weapons have to be duplicates of the original because the weapons have information about how long until they can fire again, etc, built into them. There was a bug early on where one ship got the weapons of every ship in the sector (because they weren't duplicates) and would fire an insane amount of stuff at you while the others flew around dumbly. So it's necessary.

But that screenshot illustrates a bug as well! You should never see the original wpn_lazor - wpn_lazor:2279 should instead internally have an amount of '2'. This is because they don't compare equal, and so the engine doesn't know to stack them.

As I delved into the weapons systems to get a unified feel, I kept discovering more and more kludges. The :weapons accessor only gives you primary weapons. Ammunition added to a ship somehow ends up getting registered as a primary weapon! I'm amazed this stuff works at all; it seemed pretty straightforward at the time.

Thus, today's work was almost entirely on bug #119: Weapon Unit tests. To make sure, once and for all, that they're working the way I expect. It feels like I'm going backwards (weapons were, after all, the stuff of the last milestone) but it needs to be done if I want the minibuilder to work, and I need the minibuilder for my current milestone.

I also created bug #118, wherein we warn the scenario editor if they're trying to put the player's ship up for sale. Because it's a ship like any other, and scenario creators might think "Hey, people might want to buy their original ship." If they did that, they'd get a ship that was exactly as damaged as their original ship! It does give me an idea, however: When you buy a new ship, the old one can be put up for sale in its old condition - that way you can always trade back.