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 309: Mass Distribution

The Mass Distribution (or, as I shall refer to it from now on because I'm already tired of typing the whole thing, 'MD') system took me a few days, and then it was done.

To recap: The idea behind MD was that I could label objects (say, sectors) in a certain way, and then distribute objects (say, fleets) to aforementioned sectors. So if I'd created a trading fleet, I could put it in every inhabited sector at once rather than one-by-one going through each sector and adding the fleet manually.

The only thing this really required was some GUI work (the actual adding of the objects was, as it turns out, ridiculously easy), but it required something I hadn't created before: Namely, a way to find any object in the entire universe. Thus was born:


THE OMNICHOOSER

On the top-left, all the model classes in the game. When selected, the results show every object of that type. The top-right features every label in the game, and when it's chosen it'll show every object with any of the selected labels. When both are active, it shows all objects with any of the selected labels of the given type. For my example above, I picked "KuiFleet" and "traders" to get the trading fleet I'd just mentioned. There's another one of these for the 'destination' objects (i.e. all the sectors in the universe) - there I chose "KuiSector" and "inhabited". A few button clicks later and I'd placed 20-some-odd fleets.

What this means is that I'm likely to return to creating actual content soon. I haven't kept the blog updated because I've been doing the same thing every day ("Look, listboxes are broken! Look, the OmniChooser is broken! Look, both are broken at once!") but hopefully now the MD will speed everything up and I'll have more to say.

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.