WORKING ON THE LAUNCH CODE
by Hazed
Alan is working hard on the code for ship fighting. Specifically, he is programming the ‘LAUNCH’ command that will let you shoot a missile at your opponent. This is complicated because there are a lot of things to be checked, such as making sure you have a missile ready to go, and that your opponent is still there and hasn’t run away from your mighty fighting prowess.
Then once the missile gets launched, the game needs to work out what happens. Does the missile hit your opponent’s ship? That depends on the number of sensors you have, the number of jammers installed on the other ship, and whether your enemy has a laser dedicated to defence with might shoot the missile down before it reaches them – among other things.
Then if it does hit, what damage gets done? The hull will always take some damage, and other bits of the ship may get broken as well.
It’s all very complex! So complex that it would be impossible to test every possible permutation just using a variety of characters in the game. Alan tells me he has to write something called a “full test harness”. Sounds intriguing – I’m picturing Alan dangling from the ceiling like Mission Impossible, inspecting the code from above. But actually, he explained, “it’s a separate program that pulls in code from the main program and then tries out all the code with different input values to see if the output is what you thought it should be...”
So right now I can’t estimate how long until the code is put into the game, letting you actually launch missiles at your enemies.
