Friday 19 July 2013

Ducks & Barrels

Refactoring the message routine was easier than I thought. I had already changed old c-style msg()-function to use message "event", a list where messages per turn were stored. It was essential, because there are zillions of calls to msg(). In fact, I'm not even planning to replace them, unless a part of code is refactored for other reason.

I made a clever choice to create a dedicated class for messages that are displayed and stored in the list. It's storing the message itself, color (for future use) and amount of repeats. Everything else went well, but there is a bug or more like logic error in the repeat or count of a message.

So, when you get messages like this:
Duck.
Duck.
Barrel.

It's convenient to display first two messages like this:
Duck. [2]
Barrel.

But when you store messages in the list there are only two actual messages, not three. This wouldn't be a problem during a turn, but the glitch happens between turns: if there is no new message added to the list, the message is not displayed at all.

I was in shower when I had an idea that might work. It could be possible to store the count of the last message and check if it's different than before and display the message as an extra one before the messages that were added in the list during the turn.

1 comment:

  1. Well done. I've always preferred when the log stacks repeat messages. I wish more games would implement this.

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