Monday, June 20, 2011

Dynamics & Triggers

Finally! After weeks of infrastructure I finally got Dynamic_Actors working!

Thanks to the help of the people in #C++ on freenode I was able to solve some lingering issues with my set up. Turns out that defining functions in a class derived from another class doesn't necessarily override existing functions from it's parent class. Thanks to virtuals I managed to solve that.

After the basics worked everything else was a breeze. In no time I had the Door functionality working exactly as I wanted and Dynamic_Actors are, at long last, a fundamental component of CubeWars levels! It's weird how fast coding goes once you have your fundamentals up.

In addition to that whole ordeal I've put in place a system that allows you to chain switches and use them as a rudimentry sort of logic gates. So you can have a switch somewhere that only works if another is in a specific state. This also makes the amount of stuff you can trigger with a single button virtually unlimited.

I'll be playing around with that a bit more in the future, try to get as much functionality out of that as possible, but for now I'm focussing on redesigning the Editor. It's long overdue and with my final type working (and the time it's taking to build levels partially with notepad) it seems like the best thing to do at this point.

A special thanks goes out to my new whiteboard with whom all of this would've taken considerably longer.

See you next irregular interval!