My coding project, part VIII

Move it!

Now that I had something random on the screen, I proceeded to my flying methods. After a bit of pondering I decided to stick to my speed vector approach and use a heading information for convenience. Because the displayable area was tied to the ship's position, moving the ship moved the viewport around the sector.

Rotating the ship around its axis was really simple and that's as much as I'm going to blabber about its rotate-methods. Acceleration was a big subproject the last time and it didn't let me go easily this time, either. While I'm writing this the whole accelerate method is still a work in progress, so I have to return to it later. Now I was content with being able to fly around the sector, even if it wasn't that elegantly done.

First it calculates the dx and dy values based on the heading and the acceleration. Then it checks where the nose is pointed and uses that to decide the sign of the values. If the new speed is going to exceed the ships's maximum speed, the full acceleration is not allowed. As I said, there's something fishy in my current implementation.

From one sector to another

At this point I came up with the next question: what happens when you pass the sector's boundaries? You fly to the next sector, of course. Because I hadn't set up the neighbour links to the sectors before, I had to return to the world's init. And because the sectors are initialized in a simple loop, I had to work a bit to get to the neighbour info to begin with.

In the end it took a few hours on a few evenings and caused some refactoring here and there (at least in classes Player, Sector, World and Game). My world init was slowing down considerably: when the sectors are first created, they're iterated again to first find out and set the neighbour links to directions north, south, east and west, based on their "coordinates" on the map.

When the sector's being changed the player needs to have the new sector set, the ship is to be thrown to the nearest end of the new sector (when you go north, you're moved to the southern end of the northern neighbour), it needs to be detached from the current sector and inserted into the new one. And then the sector's gameobjects are to be loaded into the world's quadtree.

I was pretty proud of my work right now, after all the swearing. In addition to everything mentioned above I also refactored the world init to be a bit prettier. Each of the sectors got a randomized amount of asteroids in them, while the vegetative enemy ships were just commented out for the time being. This was all done so that the debugging got a bit simpler.