My brain's starting to hurt from working on Cripes, heheh. Don't get me wrong, it's fun when I get things done (see the maze generator: that was pure win), but when there's some downtime I get in a slump. Luckily, I do have other things to distract me. They're not terribly gamedev-related, but I hope nobody minds if I devote a post to them! I promise I'll write some more about my Entity refactoring at the end.

Before we get into it, I is a leet hackerz. Okay, not really, but I was adding some of the GameDev forums to the My Favorites list, and I noticed that the dev journal forum didn't have a link. I grabbed the bookmark-URL-link for another forum and replaced that forum's ID with the devjournal forum (53), and voila. (Staffers: Don't kill me! *flee*)

Website Programming

Okay, so.. My father runs Daycare.com, among a bunch of other websites, and I've been doing some (paid!) work for him on it. One of the things he's having me do is take Excel and .csv databases of daycare listings and fix them up to be imported into his daycare listings database. phpMyAdmin has a handy import page which can accept CSV files, handily.

So I've done about seven or eight of these so far, and generally I have to parse the fields out into the proper format for his database. I immediately learned how to use Excel's Proper(), Mid(), Left(), and Right() functions, of course. Down the road, I learned to use If(), if there was a certain value in an original column so I could parse/merge it into another column that was going to be imported.

This last one, though, I hit on a revelation, and I thought it was pretty nifty. I realized that every cell is basically just a variable. Each cell can have a formula that stores a new value in the variable. In that sense, it's just like the kind of programming that I'm used to. So lets take an example.. There's a column, "AgeStartEnd", which holds the youngest and oldest ages a daycare would take. Each cell has values like "04W10Y", and you can probably tell what that means if you stare at it. This is where my epiphany hit me. Speaking in terms of this realization, I created a row-wise program (a series of formulas lined up in a row) which takes an input (in this case, "04W10Y" as an example) and results in an output (the last cell/variable in the program). In effect, the program split the value down the center ("04W" and "10Y"), parsed the ages into readable text ("04 weeks - " and "10 years"), removed the trailing zero if there was any ("4 weeks - " and "10 years"), and concatenated the two back together ("4 weeks - 10 years").

Quite neat, really. Oh, and never make me build IF-ELSEIF-ELSE ladders in Excel. Ever. I had to do that above, one rung each for D, W, M, and Y. Really, try doing that when the IF()'s form is IF(condition, if-true, if-false). The next rung in the IF would go in if-false, instead of being something relatively readable. I had to build the weekday converter (i.e. "MON" to "Monday") in a notepad file (with the godsend of indentation) to do it properly.

Hmm, I spent too long on Excel - it's growing on me, especially with my epiphany. I also did some nifty stuff with Apache's mod_rewrite. Given that it can't really do complex replacements like with if-else ladders to change stuff, I created one rewrite rule which captured state codes ("daycare.com/CA") and translated it to a daycare_listings.php?state_$1 page. The PHP page took that value, expanded the state code to the full state name, and redirected to full_state_name_daycare_listings.html.

Writing production code is definitely interesting.

Cripes 2.0

Alright, cripes! I'll talk about Cripes now (please, don't laugh at that). I'm going to figure out a resource manager somehow, because of this post by pulpfist. I'm surprised it didn't occur to me earlier, considering how I already knew that having a Corner with every state it could be, and having probably fifty of those corners, was slow. So that's going in as part of my Entity refactoring, probably near the beginning.

I also want to abstractify and extend my Entity class out somehow, into Mobs and Missiles. Obviously the EntityMap will have to handle both, and so it'll work with Entity pointers instead of owning the actual objects. My EntityFactory will also need to be fixed up to handle the construction of both. I'm thinking of working with some kind of pluggable factory design, here.

After all that's done, I'm going to see what I can do about collision detection. That'll be fun!... well, I had problems with it in Cripes 1.0, but hopefully I've done well enough this time around.


Comments please? I mean, I just wrote all this out for you! *beg*