Day 108: Random

I think I may stop labeling posts with the bug numbers mentioned in them, mainly because it's generating a ton of labels. Of course, if I stick with that it means I'll have to go through all my old posts and strip them out. My main reasoning is that, so far, I've never had to go back and look at a bug I fixed, then look it up on the blog.

Today I got back into the swing of coding by fixing some bugs: #143 and #144. So now when you put a planet in a sector it won't vanish mysteriously, and you won't be prompted to take on a mission while you're editing a sector.

That was just the appetizer, though. The main event was #111: Random missions. Well, there's now support in the engine for randomly creating fedex quests, though there's none in the editor or in playing the game. Most of my time, in fact, was spent writing a giant unit test which only took the most basic scenario into account. Still, it's all working and apparently working well, so tomorrow I'll probably move on to putting it into the game

To give me a bit of inspiration, I looked back at how TraderMissions had done random missions, and the answer was "Horribly". There was no difference between random and regular missions, random missions just had a few more children populated (i.e. a 'random cargo' child, which was empty in the case of a non-random mission).

My current approach separates regular missions and random missions entirely. Random missions don't even inherit from regular missions, instead they create them. If I were to have discovered this on my own, I'd have named it the Factory pattern.

There's still some issues, though. The generated missions need details like names, descriptions, etc. There's enough in common between regular missions and random mission generators that I'd like to avoid repeating myself. I'm thinking of having a 'template' child for the generator; this child will be a mission - the name of it will get expanded into the names for all of the missions. So the template mission name would be something like "[%ORGANIZATION%] Take %CARGO% to %DESTINATION%" and the resulting generated mission name would be "[Rebels] Take Fruit to Mars"

It's good to be back!