The manager module is code complete! And with about a kilobyte to spare…
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised it managed to take up nearly 12k… building interfaces and controls is by far the most expensive operation in any application. I ended up moving party re-ordering into the travel module. I had originally envisioned a separate page with animation and stuff, but I was able to build something much cheaper in memory and simpler in design.
A lot of the interface focused on only permitting options that were doable. A good example is equiping items. The interface requires you to remove items before it lets you equip something new in the same slot. Why? Because if you had, for example, a 1 handed weapon and shield in the offhand, equiping a two-handed weapon drops two items into your backpack, not one, and if a player had no space for the additional item, it would get lost, or cause an error of some kind.
Another example, if the item in question isn’t usable by the class, you’re not even given the option to equip it. The same goes for trading items. If you’re in a solo party, you can’t give anything away. If it’s a two-man party, your trading partner is obvious.
Next phase, combat! This will be interesting, besides reclaiming and rectifying the older code base, I also have some new code to write:
- Generate character set graphics dynamically for each map
- Generate battlemaps dynamically for each battle based on underlying terrain
- Allow for multiple monster types for different stats
- Allow for large monster types that occupy four squares instead of one, and must be targetable as a single entity
Cry havoc… 😉