After the previous session, I spent a good 2 or 3 days going through other editors (such as Last Ninja: The Return) to get an idea of how my aliens could function. Once of my biggest concerns was, how do enemies communicate, send out signals to other entities and similarly, receive data according to other events?
I put a post on the Blitz forum, and my good friend Muttley responded, pointing me in the direction of his game framework. However, after looking further at the Last Ninja code, a very simple solution was staring me in the face: simply use a shedload of flags.
The Last Ninja's event system basically utilised a block of memory, full of flags; certain events set specified flags, and likewise, certain events checked certain flags. Although not as tidy as an OO-based approach, it does offer a speedy solution to the problem (after all, you're not parsing every event against every object - you're only ever checking the flags you need to). Enthused by this breakthrough, I set about planning out the editor in Microsoft Word, which will hopefully save oodles of time in the long run.
Today's session saw the addition of the main Enemies Tab in the editor; I'd managed to find a way to have a Max GUI run simultaneously alongside the game, so now I needed to start populating the empty tabs with buttons, labels, radio buttons, and combo boxes.
The main problem with work like this is its intrinsic fiddlyness; it took hours - and I do mean hours - of tweaking and typing to finally get a structure established, and with the help of PhotoShop, I carefully added each element to the editor, making executive changes when things didn't quite translate from my mockup.
After making great progress, I rounded off the session by adding the functionality to switch between the various tabs. With the bulk of the work done, just one more session of editor building and I should be ready to add the functionality which ties the editor into the actual data...
