8/5/2004
Being more data driven
I got a copy of Game Programming with Python the other day. I have to say I'm liking the book so far. Over the years I've bought many a "Game Programming" book. Most of them spend the first half to third of the book explaining basic programming (in what ever language the book is targeted at). This book is different, it assumes the reader has a basic knowledge of Python and OO.
The main reason I picked this book up was after thumbing through it in the store I saw that it had a chapter called "Data Driven Simulations" and that is something I'm interested in at the moment. (Specifically, I'm taking someone else's code and trying to expand it out to make it more flexible, etc.) I've read that chapter and I'm still digesting it because there was a ton of stuff that made me think. But so far I think it is paying off, I've been making changes to my codebase and every day I work on it I feel I'm making good progress. I've almost got the mapping section to be totally data driven (as opposed to hard coded in the tile engine module). That has been pretty satisfying.
I think that the next section I will tackle is trying to make the inventory stuff more data driven. Its almost there already, but I think I want to lay it out a little bit differently. That and I need to modify the code base so that it will have more than one player in the party. The stubs are already there in a lot of places, so hopefully that will be fun also.
While doing all of this I've really gained an appreciation of how Python works. Kinda makes me feel sad inside when I have to go and work on Java stuff... ;)
The main reason I picked this book up was after thumbing through it in the store I saw that it had a chapter called "Data Driven Simulations" and that is something I'm interested in at the moment. (Specifically, I'm taking someone else's code and trying to expand it out to make it more flexible, etc.) I've read that chapter and I'm still digesting it because there was a ton of stuff that made me think. But so far I think it is paying off, I've been making changes to my codebase and every day I work on it I feel I'm making good progress. I've almost got the mapping section to be totally data driven (as opposed to hard coded in the tile engine module). That has been pretty satisfying.
I think that the next section I will tackle is trying to make the inventory stuff more data driven. Its almost there already, but I think I want to lay it out a little bit differently. That and I need to modify the code base so that it will have more than one player in the party. The stubs are already there in a lot of places, so hopefully that will be fun also.
While doing all of this I've really gained an appreciation of how Python works. Kinda makes me feel sad inside when I have to go and work on Java stuff... ;)
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