Day 302: RTFS

I finished Phase II of the great XML change yesterday. I would have posted then, but there was testing to be done to make sure it was Actually Fixed This Time, Dammit. I'm discouraged by the number of bugs that this change uncovered in my code - that is, not bugs in the new code I wrote, but code I wrote months ago and has been working fine since. This includes bugs of the "How did this ever work in the first place?" variety.

But that's all fixed, at least until I discover the bugs in this code a few months from now.

I've been trying to use XSLT as my patch tool of choice, and so far so good. Only I found a bug where it wouldn't preserve linefeeds in attributes, which was important because a lot of my descriptions ended up being like this:

<sector name="foo" description="Name.

  Here is some other stuff about this
sector.  That linefeed's important
because I don't want to go back and
manually put linefeeds where they
should have been."/>

No problem, I think, because I'm still somewhat new to the XSLT scene there's probably something I missed. Hours of all the whitespace-preserving options I can find, and no luck. Finally, I find the answer.

The coding gurus of Stackoverflow were the lucky ones to inform me: It's not a bug. Not preserving whitespace in the attributes is actually part of the XML Spec.

The only way I got away with it for as long as I did was because Ruby's XML parser was ignoring this fact. So I wrote a ruby script to do the transformation. I felt somewhat relieved that it wasn't actually my fault things weren't working out, there was a bug in REXML. Then I realized that, if I hadn't broken the spec to begin with, I wouldn't be in this mess.

Thus the Programming Tip of the Day: Even when it's not your fault, it's probably your fault.

Day 276: Rebel Yell

Much like the last blog, much work was done this time around on the planets. As you might deduce from the title, this time around I did all the rebels. What this means is that I'm done with planets....

Which pretty much means I'm done with normal content creation altogether. I'm going to have to go ahead with my earlier mass-distribution system, which means lots of coding. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it was always less tedious to code than make new content for the game. On the other hand, making new content was a very casual thing, I could just sit down and work for a bit. We'll see how it turns out.

Other things include me re-thinking the XML I'm doing. Here's what it looks like now:

<sector x=5 y=7 ...>
  <child name="planets">
    <planet .../>
  </child>
</sector>

There's a lot of stuff being replaced by those ellipses. And I mean a /lot/. Multi-line text fields are the most common. I'd like to merge them as their own elements. So it'd be something like this:

<sector tag="foo">
  <fields>
    <x>5</x>
    <y>7</y>
  </fields>
  <children>
    <planets>
      <planet/>
    </planets>
  </children>
</sector>

It's more verbose, but I also think it's an easier read. At least, when I'm debugging, it's a pain in the ass to try to locate the one field I need in a sea of text. This way they're at least on their own line.

Converting between the two will be... interesting. I think I'll start a data-format versioning system so new versions of the game will be able to understand old/differently formatted data, or at least reject it out of hand. Then I'll use the magic of XSLT to change everything I've written so far from the old format to the new.

I just learned XSLT recently, and I'm liking it. It may end up being my patch tool of choice!