Hey everyone, time for our August update. As you know, I mentioned in July/August that we were going to be starting a VLog series. Well I have followed through with that and the video is uploading as I am typing this news posting. I will not be uploading them to ModDB, they are too big and long for that. Each segment is an hour long and will cover several things for this first series.
Since most of the coding you will be seeing is C++ I have decided to teach some basic C++ in the first few parts of the series so that you can better understand what is going on.
This month we had a steady amount of progress, not too good but not bad either. I will be updating the change log on our wiki page after I finish with this article.
Player Class:
I realized that the player class did not have an set functions for resources so I added those and the code for them to the game. I also added some new variables as well for our new storage system. For more on that see Lmpgames.com. I added three variables and a vector (like an array [see videos for what an array is :P]) for that system.
Station Class:
I did some more work on the purchase function by adding in resource checks, which if true will remove the set amount of resources from the player. I also removed any and all in-class variable passes between functions since they already have access to them anyway.
Added a new function to deal with the installation or storage of the item once it has been bought.
Data System Class:
Converted the rest of the 46 "get" functions into int returns to keep in line with the change of direction made in July and fixed a bug I created when I changed a function to an int that should have been a string.
I also began adding class designations to the weaponDB matrix.
Weapon Class:
I removed any and all code relating to the casting of data from Data System since it does all of that itself now. That resulted in a 56 line removal.
Ship Class:
I removed any code for casting data from here as well. 89 lines of code were removed.
Message Processing Class:
Completed the item information page after an item has been picked from the station menu. This includes the resource checks to make sure that the player can buy the weapon. I also modified the function a bit with a loop requiring a valid input from the player since taking this action (buying an item) can drastically change the resources that the player has.
Added three new messages to the message db. The first one was a non-defaulting invalid option message the other two were related to error messages.
It does not seem like much written here like this but 164 lines of code were created. I also found that I need to alter a lot of things during the making of the vlog videos so there will be a lot more listed here for the October update.
Here is the first video in the VLog series, I will have the rest of them uploaded by Thursday.
Thanks for following the project and I will see you in December with hopefully a lot more progress.
