Day 315: How not to use Mass Distribution

The next big thing on my plate was to create the various cargos that the player could buy and sell. This was aided by the fact that I'd already diagrammed out how much I wanted the low,high,and medium versions of those cargos to cost.

I started with 'Food'. It's cheap on Earth because of the lots of landmass. So I created a cheap version of food, and moved on.

It then occurred to me that this was going to take /forever/. I'd have to create 3 states for each of the different cargos I wanted to sell (and as of now there are 6). Also there'd be no consistency between prices. A low 'food' price could be half the price of medium food, while low specimens might end up half a buck off.

"Wouldn't it be nice", I thought, "To be able to automate this in the editor somehow?"

Yes, yes it would. And since I'm the guy who wrote the editor, I did it. There are now 'auto low', 'auto medium', and 'auto high' buttons in the cargo editor, which set the values and names of the cargo to 15% lower, the same, or 15% higher than the base price, respectively.

This would still require me to create all 18 cargos. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if when you create a cargo blueprint it automatically created the low/med/hi versions of itself?

Yes, yes it would. And so again, I did it.

Here's where my brilliant plan fell down. The planets hadn't been tagged for specific cargo. So while a number of planets shared the feature that their food was cheap, I hadn't tagged them to take advantage of that and use the MD system to do all of this at once. I had two alternatives:

1. Go through all the planets and re-tag them


2. Go through all the planets and just add all the cargo I wanted

As these were equivalently labor intensive, I did the second. That's when I ran into another problem: When the cargos are automatically created as outlined above, they're just tossed into the repository. The repository stores everything in a gigantic dictionary, which of course means they're unsorted. So I still end up looking at a list of 18 different cargo items, all in arbitrary order.

Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if those were sorted?

Yes, yes it would be. Done!

I again reiterate that, as frustrated as I've been in the past by editors for other games, it's enormously liberating to actually be able to do something about it :)

Day 144: Your Ship has Come In

So I decided on a whim to cater to that tiny but vocal minority of players who might one day want a ship other than the horrible tiny one they start with. #170 is thus done!

In the fine tradition of making things worse for myself, I then made #171, #172, and #173.

#171 should prevent people from jettisoning mission-related cargo, which is a surprisingly hard fix. The part which displays this is too general to know that it's even displaying cargo, let alone which is mission related. I plan to cheat and have it check to see if its object understands :mission_related, and disallow jettisoning. This also opens things up to one day having missions give the player temporary weaponry and/or addons.

#173 is my pie-in-the-sky ship previewer. When comparing ships, it'd be great to get a side-by-side comparison, complete with how many more (or less) of a given attribute the new ship has. That's easily extended to addons, too.

#172 is, um... making tutorial items actually cost money.

One of my bosses at work has a Staples easy button that says "That was easy!" when pressed.

I'm lobbying to have the voice clip replaced with "That was surprisingly difficult!"

Day 142: Two Hundred Hours

Actually, because I was only a half hour short yesterday, I'm at 201 hours. But still, it's a milestone so I'm naming my blog after it.

Today's work was finishing #166 which means the market dialog is shiny and good and happy. You get details, # of everything it requires that it requires, # of that thing you have free, and the ability to buy/sell more than one of them at a time. I even made it work with weapons, even though that ticket's not up yet.

That's not to say things went extremely well: I had to quash a lot of typos. 15 minutes into some refactoring I decided I didn't like the way it was going, so I ended up reverting all my work up until that point. I kept putting Python syntax in Ruby, thus leading to today's Programming Tip of the Day: To make a new object, use "new".

Still, many things went right. For instance, everything that can be bought and sold has its price stored stored in an instance variable named 'price'. Thank you, me, for making that consistent! Getting weapons to work was literally four lines of code, all of which were copied and pasted from the addons adapter. I got an extra half hour of work in.

Finally, now that the market dialog is handling everything market-related, and the minibuilder and new builder dialog is handling everything build-related, I deleted the old builders. Three entire files (addons.rb, cargo.rb, and weapons.rb) housed nearly identical GUI code that is now handled in one place.

Of course, the downside of this is that, according to my spreadsheet, I wrote -190 lines of code today. I'm still calling it a win.

Day 141: Slow Ride

No, that's not the title because I took it easy today; it's because my lines of code increased by a whopping 30 over 2.25 hours of work.

Of course, LoC don't tell the whole story - I'm surprised it was positive, as I did some refactoring today and removed a fair bit of code (the old market dialog, for instance). Sometimes the most productive days are the ones where the LoC count goes backwards. That's one of the other ways this differs from Nano.

Today was touchup. #165 required me to put scrollers around the new fancy editors I'd made, and I did it and it was surprisingly easy.

#166, on the other hand, was not so easy. It requires me to have a 'preview' of the cargo/addon/weapon you want to buy. Not a big deal, the preview part was easy. It was the "This requires 1 hardpoint and 2 expansion space, and you have 0 hardpoints and 0 expansions left" part. I essentially made it so any Buyable adapter knows what kind of requirements the things it holds have. The ShipCargoAdapter has "cargo", ShipAddonAdapter will have "expansion" and "hardpoints", etc. These are mapped to actual function names, so I can then dynamically generate the message.

That part's done for the "You have 3 cargo free" part, but not for the requirements. I'm already over my quota for the day, though, so on to tomorrow!

Procrastination for the win!

Day 139: Miscalculation

"Hey Roger, when did you start this thing, anyway?"
Yesterday, you might have thought I started it sometime in early February, which would have made it day 119 and been a rather belated New Year's Resolution. I actually started keeping track of everything in a spreadsheet on January 12th. I just today discovered a mistake on my spreadsheet that wasn't counting 20 days of work. So the answer to your question is no, watching the Lost season finale did not catapult you 20 days into the future.

Today I got #120 and #131 done, which means the new market dialog is live! I didn't take any 'before' screenshots, so imagine something that's worse than this 'after' screenshot:



Also, those numbers in the 'status' bit haven't changed, but they're important because I made a huge change to the way cargo was handled. All the tests still pass, though. Ship it!

Wait, no, don't ship it yet. I was kidding! Put down the packing tape!