Spring Cleaning and Small Triumphs
Ah, a day of blissful laziness. I slept until a shameful hour, finished playing my Lost game, and spent time working on my own game. A large part of today’s work was actually just code cleanup – putting things in logical order, and fixing my headings (I had books inside of chapters, volumes inside of parts – it was a complete mess) which rendered the new “Contents” pane much more usable.
Fitted out a couple more rooms with scenery and objects, including a filing cabinet, which led to today’s triumph. I wanted to have it so that only one drawer in the cabinet could be open at a time, without actually requiring the player to close one himself. My first 15 attempts at coding it ended in run-time errors (and to think, I was so giddy when there were no compile-time errors!) so I started drafting a plea for help on raif.
It’s sort of amusing – I agonize over my pleas for help because I’m always just slightly worried that someone will take one look at my bad code and laugh at me. I know no one would; it’s just an irrational fear. So in response to that fear, I kept flipping between my post and my code, trying to fix my code up in a way that at least got my intention across without looking woefully incompetent.
And wouldn’t you know it – in the process of making my code presentable, I ended up figuring it out for myself. Ah, the sweet bliss of being able to cancel a post…
When I created this cabinet, I realized I needed to create a kind called “drawer” so that I could have 3 of them that acted in conjunction with each other. I suppose there is some way to do it without creating the “drawer” kind, but I can’t imagine it would be more graceful than what I achieved (that’s not to say there’s not a more graceful way than the one I did use, of course).
So eventually, I made it so that any attempts to open a drawer would automatically close a drawer that was already open. This also gave me a chance to really strengthen my understanding of “calling names”, which I think I finally really “get”.
Things are definitely getting easier and more intuitive. Best of all, I’m really having fun.
I have started working on something for the first time in Inform 7 and have also been very pleasantly surprised by how steadily things have become more intuitive.
Hi. I did some inform7 coding for my degree project in computer science and also bumped into some of your problems – you should check out the examples from the ifarchive db, there you will find an example that deals exactly with the drawer problem. Also, if u want, I can help you in developing matters.
cristina_ursi2001@yahoo.com is my e-mail, write me if u like , good luck and take care!
and u should really stop complaining about the laziness or predisposition of letting things go easily. it happens to all of us
the important thing is not to acknowledge it, but to change
ohhh.. who am I fooling, i am also deep in this too, and this sort of advices i know they are not helping.