April 2022 - Week 135 - Peepee

Summary

• Communal sleeping
• Bladder need
• Buildings from file

Detail

Yup, I am a child.

On Sunday Dwergs also find places to sleep in common bedrooms, shared bedrooms and will claim any unclaimed bedrooms too.

I spend Monday interviewing two people and then trying to decide between the four candidates.

From Tuesday through Thursday morning I'm looking at the many advantages of sleeping in a bed. Conversely, sleeping on wet ground results in a drop in mood and the Dwerg is not even fully rested come the morning. I make a decision on who to hire and I'll share more about that next week.

On Thursday afternoon I start on the Bladder need. Simply introducing the need causes about thirty tests to break. Twenty of them use a common utility function that clears needs so they're simple to fix. A number of the other tests expect specific values and I fix them by updating the values. I'm conscious these are brittle and I'll think about a more robust fix the next time they break.

On Friday I spend the morning making sprites and UI icons for the Latrine Pit. This is the first building that will consist of two parts. Here we have the top, a hole with sturdy planks to squat upon.

And the bottom, a stone-lined pit.

In the afternoon I start adding these two buildings. As with Rooms and Behaviours I decide it's time to move the Building Templates out into a JSON (text) file. This highlights an issue with flags I ignored when doing the Room Templates. I want flags to be specified as readable strings in the template files but the templates use data structures that are transmitted over networks. The fix for this might be a custom JSON converter and an attribute that can be specified in the protocol-buffer definition files. Or, simpler but more repetitive, a separate data structure that defines the same thing but uses the flag enumeration types instead of integers.

For the next week I'll be preparing for the QA Playtester and continuing with the Bladder need.