First a quick update:

– Fixed some errant bugs in the menu system that was making **** crash – also implemented dropping **** and that’s working fine.

– Dealt with some potential memory leaks… in a program as small and simple as this, a few memory leaks wouldn’t really be an issue, but I feel better having taken care of them anyway.

– I added a clbum for special tile objects, such as doors, traps, stairways etc. So far only doors are implemented.

– To complement my new doors, I made the opening action! This is the first action I made that can be generated implicitly – that is to say, just walking into a door can generate an opening action. As a result, I needed to make a quick function to get confirmation from a player (like a ‘type y/n’ ) kind of thing. That’s working well!

Things on my agenda:

– My current menu system is ok, but I want to add a lot more detail to it. It’s tedious to stand on a big stack of items and have to pick up each item one by one. When I have the motivation I’m going to make some big changes to allow you to choose multiple items from a menu at once.

– I need to start thinking about adding some creatures other than the player to the mix. That’s going to be a very large task, and I’m kind of procrastinating on that.

– Another big, difficult part that I’ve been procrastinating like mad is the whole Field of Vision problem. I’m very taken with the method described here. I’m not convinced it’s my best option, but I’m thinking of trying it out soon.

Anyway, I promised you guys some broader details about how things are working/going to work, but I’m going to spread it out over several posts. Here’s a morsel:

Modeling the world

Luckily for me, object-oriented programming makes this kind of thing very easy to pull off coherently. A tile is represented by an instance of a Tile clbum, a creature is represented by an instance of a Creature clbum, etc. etc. Once I defined what all of these objects are, it was easy to make a kind of hierarchy – for example, a Tile has all of the tile’s relevant data (is it pbumable, what it’s made of), but it also contains pointers for anything that could potentially be on that tile, such as a creature, special object or list of items. those things in turn have their own data and pointers. If you needed to, you could travel down the line someway like this:

dungeon -> map -> tile -> creature -> Inventory -> Item -> Item name.

Basically any information in the entire active area is accessible in this manner, and you can start from anywhere in the list to work your way downwards. In some cases, you can even go backwards up the line from some things.

Anyway, I’m ****ing tired. Dunno if that was what you guys were looking for or not, but in later posts i’ll talk more in depth about other things. ‘night