301 Days (redux)

Another metric leap year of gamedev experiments and such

Day 12 - More Sweeping Up

Sep 11, 2015 - 3 minute read - OldDaysste-reez-muvi

Trim away a little bit of technical debt, or at least make things look a little better.

What are those NPCs doing there?

What are those guys doing there? What are those guys doing there?

When we change the top Z layer, we’re only enabling/disabling map cells, nothing else. Hence the NPCs (and portals) floating in space.

All we need is a little structural reorg for the portals, and this:

Managers/MapManager.cs GitLab 
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public void UpdateZ(float z) {
    Renderer currRend;
    foreach (Vector3 v in cell_transforms.Keys) {
        currRend = cell_transforms[v].GetComponent<Renderer>();
        currRend.enabled = (v.z <= z);
    }
    foreach (Vector3 v in cellsContainingNpcs.Keys) {
        foreach (int npcId in cellsContainingNpcs[v]) {
            currRend = npcTransforms[npcId].GetComponent<Renderer>();
            currRend.enabled = (v.z <= z);
        }
    }
    foreach (Vector3 v in portalTransforms.Keys) {
        currRend = portalTransforms[v].GetComponent<Renderer>();
        currRend.enabled = (v.z <= z);
    }
    zTop = z;
}

Out of mind, out of sight. Out of mind, out of sight.

Done.

Get rid of the big list - Act One

Yucky set of lists in the Unity Inspector. Yucky set of lists in the Unity Inspector.

This started as a quick hack so I could mess with the cell materials directly in the Unity editor, and quickly entrenched itself. Time to pull it out by the roots.

We should translate the display string directly into a material name, but a lot of those strings have special characters that don’t play nice with the file system. So we’ll fall back on ASCII codes:

Managers/MapManager.cs GitLab 
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String StringToAsciiHex(String s) {
    byte[] ASCIIValues = Encoding.Convert(Encoding.Unicode, Encoding.ASCII, (Encoding.Unicode).GetBytes(s));
    return BitConverter.ToString(ASCIIValues);
}
…and then we can replace the weird parallel array lookup with:
Managers/MapManager.cs GitLab 
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if (!cellMaterials.ContainsKey(cells[v].DisplayGraphic)) {
    String materialName = StringToAsciiHex(cells[v].DisplayGraphic);
    Material cellMaterial = Resources.Load("Materials/Cells/" + materialName, typeof(Material)) as Material;
    if (cellMaterial == null) {
        print("Couldn't find material " + materialName + " for display graphic \"" + cells[v].DisplayGraphic + "\"!");
        Debug.Break();
    } else {
        cellMaterials[cells[v].DisplayGraphic] = cellMaterial;
    }
}
rend.material = cellMaterials[cells[v].DisplayGraphic];
rend.enabled = true;
We maintain a dictionary of cell materials so we don’t have to call Resources.Load for every cell. Now all we need is the materials:

Only a little less readable than my previous naming convention. Only a little less readable than my previous naming convention.

So now we can have:

…with no actual change in functionality, and it seems a bit faster, too!

Next time

We’ll tackle this thing that keeps getting worse:

Managers/MapManager.cs GitLab 
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    UpdateCellContents();
    cellsContainingNpcs.Clear();
    UpdateNpcs("Phong");
    UpdateNpcs("Rocky.T.Orc");
    UpdateNpcs("Ydnac");
    UpdateNpcs("boar");
    UpdateNpcs("bear");
    UpdateNpcs("crocodile");
    UpdateNpcs("orc");
    UpdateNpcs("wolf");
    UpdateNpcs("centaur");
    UpdateNpcs("griffin");
    UpdateNpcCohab();

Day 12 code - client