23 October 2014

Hip Hip Array!

I had a script working absolutely fine (by which I mean it worked "mostly fine"), and then I made some changes to it which involved the inclusion of some diagnostics.

And then the Bad Things began.

My script was basically building multiple arrays by collecting data and indexing it non-sequentially.  Instead of assigning data to my_array[ 0 ], followed by my_array[ 1 ], then my_array[ 2 ], I would first collect data for my_array[ 5 ], followed by data for my_array[ 3 ], and so forth.

My diagnostics printed out all of the data collected by the arrays, and that data was incorrect.  "Math," I cursed, and started debugging.  Socks recently supported negative indexes (which means instead of writing my_array[ index - 1 ], I could instead just write my_array[ -1 ] ), and I was convinced that my array index pointer was somehow falling into a negative number.  I added more diagnostics.  The correct answers were being displayed correctly with these new diagnostics, but the data was still wrong within the summarized diagnostics.

Three days of debugging and I found the problem: my script was absolutely fine, but my summary diagnostics were looking at the wrong sets of data types.  Once I corrected that, then all of the data matched.

I am such a chucklehead sometimes.

13 October 2014

Math Is Fun

I've spent the past three days working on some new scripts.  One of the scripts required (ugh) math.  And not just X + Y = Z kind of math, but more like the A² + B² = C² kind of math.  I needed to draw some circles, but I forgot how to do that.  And by "forgot" I really mean "I was never really clear on how to do this in the first place."

So I asked Mr. Google.

Google returned, what turns out to be, a very good site: Math is fun!  The particular section that I needed was help on sines and cosines, and the mathisfun.com site explained these functions very clearly and simply.

Thanks to both mathisfun.com and Google for the help.  My script is behaving just as I had envisioned it behaving -- perhaps a little bit more.  I'm really excited, and look forward to finishing the script.  The hardest part has been done: arranging objects in circles on the screen!

08 October 2014

Undercover Boss(es)

Tonight I tried a soft-open on a new monster type that I had discussed in the past.  While this whole concept is still in its testing phase (and I am aware of several bugs, so I know that this concept is far from being finished).  I was very pleased to see that my new monster template worked as intended.


Thanks to everyone who (unwittingly) participated!