Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Aye caramba, another marathon coding session. I’ve been at it since close to midnight, so I think I can safely log 5 hours tonight. I was hoping to get the Mini Conquest menu and the Game Settings menu working, but I’ve only managed to get the Mini Conquest menu done, though that was the bigger task of the two. Much bigger.

Before I get into the menu I should note that I updated the database. Here’s the new file. This isn’t a significant update, I made some minor changes to help improve the readability of my code. You’ll notice that now every record has the fields in the same order. This is because I now have enums defined in script

$TEXT_FIELD  = 0;
$VALUE_FIELD = 1;
$DATA_FIELD  = 2;
$DESC_FIELD  = 3;

I use these when accessing data from a TorqueDB record. Beforehand I would do

%tempData = TorqueDB.searchByInstanceWithClass("class name", "field", %fieldValue);
lblSomeLabel.setText(%tempData.contents[0]);
$gameData.data = %tempData.contents[2];

Now I do

%tempData = TorqueDB.searchByInstanceWithClass("class name", "field", %fieldValue);
lblSomeLabel.setText(%tempData.contents[$TEXT_FIELD]);
$gameData.data = %tempData.contents[$DATA_FIELD];

It’s a minor change but it greatly improves code readability. Now I can come back to it and not have to wonder which field I was extracting data from. Working the other way, I don’t have to remember the index number of each field when I’m programming it.

So onto the menu. I made a lot of improvements in code from the menus I built for our other title Blitz Blox (which I halted work on since it needs real-time networking and T2D currently only has support for turn-based networking. BB is a real-time game, GC is a turn-based game). There are three main areas to note.

No more disabled buttons

In the BB menus, when you reached the end of the available options for that menu item the button would disable itslef, and you’d have to click back using the other button (< and > buttons). This was rather tedious because for every button click I had to check whether I had hit the end, and then disable the button as well as check to see if the other button was disabled, and enable it once the user started clicking back the other way. In GC’s menus when you reach the end of the options it just simply wraps around to the beginning. You can click on just one arrow and cycle through the options as many times as you want, and then go back the other way with the other arrow. It’s also nicer just from a UI perpective, because now to get to the last option from the first one, you can just click once on the left arrow and be there rather than click 4 or 6 or more times on the right arrow to get there.

No more functions for each button

In BB’s menus, each button’s command field would point to an individual function, like targetScoreLeft(); and targetScoreRight(); I started doing this for GC but quickly came to my senses after the first button pair. Why have two functions when you can just have one? I think my decision to not disable buttons also led towards this insight, since it removed some code from each function and let me better see how to combine the two. Now each button pair has a single function with a parameter to determine which button was pressed

So here is a single function used by the buttons that cycle through the game music selection. The left button calls gameMusic($BUTTON_LEFT); and the right button calls gameMusic($BUTTON_RIGHT);. Here also at the end you can see the practical application of TorqueDB for GUI use, where I use it to update text labels.

eval() is my friend

Another thing that saved me an umpteen amount time and equal lines of code is the eval() function. This handy-dandy little feller takes a mix of variables and expressions and evealuates it as a single line of code. I dunno if that explains it all that well so here’s a fitting example

This is the function that changes the labels and values for each player controller. That’s right, this one function is called by eight buttons from four players. The left button from player 1 would call it playerController($BUTTON_LEFT, 1); whereas the right button from player 3 would call it playerController($BUTTON_RIGHT, 3);. This means I have three functions that control the player menu options instead of twelve. hell if I hadn’t decided to combine each button pair into a single function it would have been TWENTY-FOUR. Well holy crap, when you put it that way…

The one thing I didn’t do right… yet

Despite all my wonderful accomplishments for the night there is one thing I have yet to fix. If you’ll look back up at the gameMusic() function and check the code for where I wrap from one end to the other, you’ll notice I’m using static integers. *shudder*. I tried for half an hour to figure out how to get the size of a record so that I can dynamically check for the end of available options. So right now if I were to add a music track to the database I would have to edit this function to have it pick up that new entry. I’ll be posting a question about that on the GG boards before bed tho.

Coming up next

Well like I said, I was hoping to get the Settings menu done as well but I still haven’t hit my stride programming in TorqueScript/T2D. I find myself referencing the documentation for both quite often still, but I’m getting better. So tomorrow I hope to get the Settings menu done. After that my next step will be planning out how to use T2D’s tile editor as a base for GC’s map editor and to start building maps I can use to play a game on.

Ah well, I suppose I can indulge myself with a few hours of sleep now. Till next time….

Oh yea I had told myself earlier that I was going to read other ppl’s journals tonight before posting mine but… yea… kinda too late for that so sorry 😛 Hope to catch up with some of you next time!