So it's been a few weeks since I last updated the blog.
I've been most busy working on CubeWars in this past period. So far I've laid most of the ground work for the Dynamic_actors and I should probably get a functional one in the game this week or next. There was just a lot more general design that went into it... more then I anticipated. But I'm happy where I am now with all that. Pretty soon adding new actors, of any type, should be simple and clean and I can focus on getting the game the way I want it.
In this period I've also been reworking some other things that correlate to Dynamic_actors. For one, I've routed *ALL* Actor <=> Player interactions through the Level class. The reason for this is that this makes trigger handling a lot more manageable. I can, in theory, very easily do trigger chaining or have objects of one type trigger objects of another, without much hassle. Also, it sets the precedent for the Dynamic_actor class, which are pretty much required to be handled this way, because of the way I designed them.
It feels pretty good to have these consistent themes throughout the code though.
Other things of note that I've been working on:
Enums, they're beautiful bastards which I'm beginning to use more and more in stead of more cryptic code. So where I had a "static_actor.type = 3" you'll now find "static_actor.type = SWITCH".
I've also spent some time on redesigning the Obstacle static_actor... y'know, the one that used to be my Door. The idea is that it'll be used to make parts of the level dynamic in the sense that you can move whole sections from A to B with the flick of a switch. Or make them invisible... or even to just fill up another section with a bunch of tiles. Combining this with the fact that Switches can now trigger multiple targets... and I have plans for multi-triggers, to allow you to trigger large amounts of objects at once, it should make levels very... interesting.
There's also a few minor optimizations done, some clean up here and there... and me postponing the Interface/Editor redesign for another day. Let's get this working before I delve into that.
I hope to have some more concrete news for next week.
Until then!
