Tag: Observer Pattern

Regression and ignorance

One of the more involved aspects of the Argus story engine is how characters learn and express information about each-other. Some of that knowledge is just used for conditional narrative, but the most important part (currently) is how characters address each-other.

Names, titles, nationality, differing levels of formality, age, gender, and more, all get churned through sets of constructs provided by the story, which ultimately result in some form of address. That’s what I call the reference model. It’s updated as characters learn new information about each-other, and gaps in the knowledge-structure are filled in with assumptions, where no direct knowledge exists.

And annoyingly, way down in scene 360, one of the characters seemed suddenly unable to create a valid form of address for the character she was speaking to.

Continue reading Regression and ignorance

Decoupling

As a result on doing some more work on Argus’ story compiler (which makes the module sound far more impressive than it actually is), I discovered that the early development prototyping had made the core engine code (the really portable workhorse library) far too tightly coupled with the platform-specific UI code.

That is, there were sections of the engine library that you couldn’t pull in without having to satisfy a lot of platform UI dependencies.

Thankfully, Observer patterns came to the rescue, and I was able to use these to decouple the engine library from having to have any direct knowledge or linkage to the UI module.

Well, mostly. Almost every case has been handled, but there’s still two parts left to do: The display of interstitial images, and managing the UI elements for character selection.

That’s all just a matter of dog-work, though. Sit down and actually cut the code. Bum on seat, code in editor.