Day 103: Blogging - "Kuiper Dev Blog"

Today's subject likens to that two-line fix I did today, #35. That's right, when editing a module the game will change its window title to "Kuiper - Editing 'Your Game Title Here'", and when playing it'll be "Kuiper: Your Game Title Here". This ticket was put in a long time ago because I couldn't tell my editing and testing windows apart. I had some spare time at the end of the day and hacked it in.

Sadly, that was the only easy part of today. Most of the work was on #135, getting sectors to do what Planets were doing easily - in this particular case, that's handling missions. The main problem was that planets' checking was simple, they had to do it once because a new planet GUI is re-created every time you land. The sector GUI sticks around when you go to other states.

The 'return from another state' code looks like this:

def awaken
  @continue.call if continue

  do_mission_checks
end

It has to be like that, because do_mission_checks requires the continuation support in order to work. But the problem is, if any other state sets @continue (and they all do), then it's called and the mission checking never happens.

The fix is, take every state you're transitioning to with a continuation and, when it comes back, force a call to awaken:

def land
  callcc do |continue| 
    @continue = continue
    @driver << planet
  end
  # We'll resume here
  simulate_passage_of_time
  awaken unless @continue
end

That way we call awaken when we need it to process mission events, but not if calling it would call a continuation. All told I wrote about 8 lines of code, net. If only all days were as simple as yesterday!