For those of you not on the Freeworlds forums, I'm Oma. A month or so ago, I answered for the call to become a junior coder for the project. Honestly, up to this point, I had little to no experience in it. But, thanks to Sushi's awesome tutorials, even a fresh freshed coder can make a difference!
The only boring thing about coding is that, unlike other people, there isn't allot to actually show you in terms of screenies and other things. Seriously, who wants to see lines and lines of code.
But yeah, it been a busy weekend. I put my head down and really tore through the shiplist, adding them in. When I first watched Sushi's video on it, it was like three quarters of an hour long. There was me thinking 'Feck, it is going to take that long to imput a ship at a time'. As you can imagine, not the greatest feeling at all at all.
But working off the cuff, man it is so much faster. I think at some stages, I was adding ships in about a quarter of an hour. At times, I had to resist temptation to try to multi-code ships in at a time. It is always safer to just go one at a time, and get her in right.
Basically, we took the list of ships into the divided factions and worked at it like that. It's easier to work with all the NR fighters or all the CIV freighters all at once, as opposed from going from NR ship X to CIV freighter Y. It would be a case of bouncing up and down the code until the mouse scroller burnt out. (Off topic, I actually got the darn thing working again.. not a moment too soon.)
I've tweaked the break layout in the code a bit. Not that there was much wrong with what it was, but personally.. I like things clean and well ordered. Anyone who has served in a squadron led by me back in the day will know what I was talking about. It's just an easier way to find stuff on a whim, rather than having to glance hard at a code. I've copied that style into all pertaining files.. so everything is well indexed and has the same orderly uniform.
I've also worked out my own 'get to' files system. See, we are dipping in and out of various folders to get what we need. After a while, the constant clicking back and forward.. gets headwrecking. So I've placed about half a dozen shortcuts on my desktop to each of them.
The majority of the ships and freighters are now coded in to the game. There are few left that are either lacking models, or some other lil niggles that need sorting. From here, its one of two things.. well, first off, I'm taking a day or two from looking at code - because Sushi doesn't want me burning out after I nailed all that code.
So it is a case of waiting on the cap ship tutorial. That.. will be interesting, given the amount of gunnage and such that goes on those tubs. Thing about fighters and freighters is, I know off hand what needs to go into them having flown them plenty. Caps - I stay away from those drunken dinos because they just scream target practice. So as to the amount of different things that go into them, well it's all new.
Second is to go back through things and start working on the camera angles and fool around with the engine glows. Both have been both to the wayside, mainly because we want the ships in and working. That is priority one. Fuses, which I believe Sushi mentioned in his blog, I'm happy to leave till later. Making ships go boom in fantastical ways will be cool - but it is hard to gauge explosions when you don't have anything to shoot at to see how it comes off.
Ahh the fun of it all.
