Once again, the gears have started to turn, my fingers come in touch with the keyboard and on the other side is BYOND Dream Maker indiscriminately recording my deluge of mistakes. I've picked up my old Vehicle Wars project and decided to work on turning it into a game.

Instead of having 3 controllable factions, I'm now working on simply having one faction: our Terrans, who have arrived on a planet to turn it into a colony. Behold the power of the Keep It Simple, Stupid principal, as everything comes together beautifully at that point: the existing Native AI works excellently as an opposing force of wild, unsophisticated creatures, and the Terrans already have the mechanics in place to build whatever they're told to build. I was much closer to a finished (if not complicated or refined) game than I thought.



Unfortunately, I've run into an immediate hitch: I need to bring the player's commands into the game where the existing code already is, and that's proving quite a mind bender (especially after a two month vacation from hard development).

Here I thought before I was developing an advanced artificial intelligence because I was distracted with it as a bit of an experiment. Now, I think perhaps I was doing it because I was taking the path of least resistance. It seems I've still a rather important thing to learn about BYOND, and that is how to create a really good control scheme.

In this entry you'll see where I was: I had hotkeys, I was trying to manipulate things through objects that were placed in the contents of things, and decided against it because it's very obj bloaty and technically I already have verbs to do that.

What I need to do now (instead of blog about doing it) is get really comfortable with verbs, to the point where I can take a verb list and create those hotkey banks from them. The goal is for the players to simply click on a hotkey, then double click on the map, and the appropriate verb activates there.

It's beginning to look like what I might need to make a compromise instead, because I don't think BYOND's verb functionality was really built to do that. The access control would probably tear apart any attempts to access them by proxy in this manner.

So, what will be my final solution? Perhaps ditch this idea of there being a bank of 12 hotkeys and simply create one scrollable list of currently available verbs. Perhaps simply use the native right-click verb functionality, put the verbs on the turfs as accessible by all players and control access via verb arithmetic. I've gotten rid of the stat panel, my point-and-click interface makes things very easy on the players, but not so easy on me.