Day 140: Map and Jumping

I finished #155 today, and named my blog post after it. The total explanation for how to use the map and how to jump out of the sector was maybe two paragraphs, and it took the entire two hours to do. Thankfully, it's not because I'm a slow typist.

No, the reason it was so problematic was #162. The previous tutorial mission which tells you to land on the planet only ends when you get the map-and-jumping mission. In order to do this, map-and-jumping sets a flag upon receipt, and land-on-planet checks this flag to see if it's ending. If it is, it removes itself.

I have a condition check for this. It had three fields: is_set, number_is and note_is. Those last two are to check if the flag is set to the given number or has the given note attached. Is_set was, I thought, to merely check to see if the flag was set.

I checked the unit tests to find that its purpose was originally the exact opposite. If you didn't specify is_set, it would return true if the flag was not set. Otherwise, the note or number had to match.

So there was some refactoring. Now is_set does what I originally wanted, and there's a new is_not_set which, if selected, returns true if the flag hasn't been set yet.

That was working, the land-on-planet mission was vanishing at the right time, but the map-and-jumping mission wasn't working at all: it was supposed to pop up an informational box about how to, well, pull up the map and jump the ship around. It wasn't. I started having flashbacks to my two-day multi-hour coding binge of doom. I really didn't want there to be something I'd have to re-code the entire notification system for.

And, lucky me, there wasn't. In fact, it was the other mission, the land-on-the-planet mission, that was causing the problem. The loop which checks all the missions looks like this:

@player.missions.each do |m|
  m.check
end

The problem being that check can end the mission, and thus remove it from the @player.missions array! This messes up the loop, and it ends up thinking it's done and not checking the other mission.

Thus, @player.missions.dup Life was surprisingly easy after that!