Plan for Mike Nelson

Mission Generator tools moving into the editor.

Right now I’m working on integrating the Mission Generator stuff into the editor for Myrmidon. It took some experimentation to get it setup the way that I wanted. But I think I got it figured out. I’ve got some of the aspects fleshed out and working already. I’m trying to do as much as I can in the scripts.

I’ve put a lot of thought into the design of it so it’ll be simple, useful, and easy to manage. The design that I have in mind now is a lot simpler than what I had dreamed up originally.

Now I’m ready to dive in and put in the rest of the stuff. Some of it is kind of technical but I’m feeling good as I went in and added a fairly complex feature in a half hour and it actually worked without errors or issues on the first try. This feature was a square scatter region (which allows for dynamic placement of rocks, trees, etc. on the terrain within a square area, sort of like Melv May’s fxReplicator) and it involved drawing a dynamic semi-transparent cube around the scatter region in the editor and tweaking some of the parameters so you can move it around in the editor and getting it to work cleanly with the previous phase code. I then tried to break it with every test case that I could think of and it still worked. You can imagine my surprise! Oh well, maybe I’ll get to break it later.

Man it sure pays do design and research up front. It’s cool when you see software engineering practices pay off. If I just went in coding without really thinking about the design I’d probably still be refactoring and tinkering with the code on this one item.