Wednesday 31 August 2011

Review of monsters

Today I was looking at the Monster class. It's 2971 lines of code which in Kaduria is one of the biggest source files. Most of it is ok, but it's missing AI code and role-playing system parts. It has been difficult to create the rpg system itself, because I suck at it. However I feel that if I can nail this one it's going to be much easier to complete the game. This is the important part, how to make monsters tick so to speak.

Another difficult thing is the relationship between Monster and Player classes. I now realize that there should be a clear derived-type construct which should not be broken (which I have done). It's another issue which is going to take some time to fix. But even with all these difficulties I'm optimistic. I have learned my lessons.

Saturday 27 August 2011

Snow fox

I may have been too careful not to add too much content (like new creatures, items, etc.) during the process of programming the engine, but I guess it's time to forget the engine for a while and just add anything that is needed.

Level themes are quite strongly themed with specific monsters and other stuff, but I try to avoid making them too predictable by trying to break the rules randomly. I have thought that it could be possible to entirely replace a part of dungeon area with another theme, but that's something to consider later.

The problem with adding stuff is that it can be later tiresome to edit all that data if/when something changes, but then again I haven't spent all this time for nothing: the engine is flexible enough to introduce new stuff without too much extra programming.

So, again I'm at the snow top, wondering what kind of creatures live here...

Friday 26 August 2011

New member

I was bored so I decided to refactor some code. Key_Handler was changed to modular class with minor changes and it went into classes directory which contains all modular classes of the project. They are classes that need least amount of maintaining. Whenever I get something in classes directory it's like those lines of code are removed from the usual maintaining horror this kind of project has.

Even two or three weeks off the project seems to make it possible to look at the code from a distance and possibly create better decisions in how to proceed.