Day 247: Express Yourself

As mentioned yesterday, in the Bad Old Days (i.e. those before today) you had to name something and then give it a descriptive tag which was often just the thing name re-branded. Well those days are over!

The 'auto' button now takes the name and creates a tag for it. So:

Name: The Best Player in the World is from a City in an Arboretum

Becomes:

Tag: player_best_player_world_city_arboretum

So the tag is based on the type of object, plus a scaled down version of the name. As you no doubt noticed, I took out a bunch of connector words there (mainly articles). This involved regular expressions.

At first, I was doing something like this:

name.gsub!(/\sthe\s/,' ')
name.gsub!(/\sa\s/,' ')
name.gsub!(/\san\s/,' ')

Yes, I had one line for each thing I wanted to remove, which is of course silly. So I made a list of all the excluded words and tried again, only I ran into a problem. It's not a string I'm using for matching here, it's a regular expression - meaning I couldn't just throw the current loop value in the middle and expect it to work!

Luckily, there's a way to do exactly that:

exclusions.each do |x|
excludeMiddle = Regexp.new("\s#{x}\s")
name.gsub!(excludeMiddle,' ')
end


Regexp.new takes a string, from which it'll create a regular expression. And I can do all the manipulating I want within strings!

Also I made a few more planets using the new autotagging feature. But that's not as exciting.

Day 246: Checking In

This time, I've been half working, half slacking. Though I did take a few days off, I also continue to face the fact that "Made some planets and tagged them" remains a very boring blog entry. So I'm trying to split my time up even further - 30 to 45 minutes for the planets, then 15 to whatever else I feel like doing for one of my many features I haven't yet implemented.

Today's feature was putting an 'auto' button next to the 'tag' input. So now, instead of naming something "Monster Island" and then having to click down to 'tag' and type "planet_monster_island", you can now just hit the 'auto' button and it'll come up with that for you. Well, it would if it worked - right now it just says "You clicked the auto button!"

Features I did previous to today include accidentally creating a planet I didn't mean to and then realizing that I had no way to delete planets. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson after making the exact same mistake with Sectors.

Day 239: Mass Effect

I started this blog because I saw a number of my fellow developers making dev-blogs for their projects. I had two thoughts:

1. I won't have anything to blog about: This was the primary reason I haven't blogged in the past, I'm just not that interesting. In this case, though, I can blog often because this is a daily project. Lately, as you've no doubt noticed, this practice has fallen by the wayside. I've continued to work, but writing up the blog post takes a lot more time and so I've tended to skip it.


2. Nobody will read it: How I'm developing my game is of little interest to anyone except pretty hardcore game developers who are familiar with ruby, rubygame, and interested in my game enough to read about it instead of working on their own. This set is maybe three people, five tops. I've since discovered that having the blog is invaluable - I've searched through it a number of times to find how I did something earlier, and the fact that I blogged about it made it simple to look up. Even if no other living soul even glances at this blog, it's already been of enormous use.

So that said, the slow pace of blogging may continue. When I'm writing code, I often have something to say about how I implemented it. When I'm developing content, what I have to say is pretty much "Created a few sectors".

Now, however, I'm coding. I created a ton of sectors and a few planets, and it occurred to me that later, when I've made a "standard array" of ships I want the player to be able to buy, I'm going to have to go back to every single planet I made and put those ships up for sale there.

The upside to being the author of a game editor is that if you don't like how it's doing something, you can change it. Today I began work on the "Mass Distribution" system. Each object has labels (like tags, only I call them 'labels' because I'm already using 'tag') that group it, and the Mass Distribution system will allow you to take a ship, a weapon, a mission, etc, and give it to everything that shares a label. So if I, while creating these new planets, label them something like "alliance, standard, human", I can go back and easily give the standard array of weapons,ships, etc, to all the planets which share whatever tags I want.

I may modify the random mission generator to use this technology as well.