Coding on vicodin...

In the course of my project I have come to depend on a number of patches to T2D which may or may not survive into future versions of the engine. Notably, the OO TorqueScript patch. This is a wonderful patch -- it almost makes TorqueScript a usable language in and of itself, but I've come to realize that relying on it is problemmatic for me. If I encounter a problem, how do I know whether the crash is in T2D, or the patch? If I attempt to get support from GG or forum members, how do I prove that the problem is not in the patch? Being told to remove the patch and see if things work without it isn't practical as it would involve radically rewriting most of my script code (which is the majority of my game).

So what do I do? Rely on a large, complex patch that I don't understand, which modifies an engine I don't understand, and may or may not work with T2D 1.1 once the TGE 1.4 merge is complete? Rewrite my script code to not be OO (a non-trivial undertaking given the nature of my game)?

The other alternative is to systematically start rewriting my script classes in C++. This would force me to develop a better understanding of the engine, and would limit engine changes to smaller changes that I understand better than relying on a large, sweeping, deep patch. And so, that is what I have begun doing.

I had a script class called StaticBlock, which inherited from fxSceneObject2D and essentially acted as a wrapped for an fxTileMap2D/fxTileLayer2D providing game-specific operations for positioning, rotating, and so forth.

I started by making a C++ class of the same name that did virtually nothing. I changed my script class to be called ScriptBlock and made it inherit from StaticBlock. I then systematically started moving functionality up into the StaticBlock class until I no longer needed the OO patch to make it work. Cross-language refactoring however is not an easy thing, especially since I haven't used C++ since before there was an ISO spec (and even then I only dabbled in it). I kept getting the most bizarre crashes at random times in seemingly unrelated code.

Enter the vicodin. You see, I am presently recovering from minor surgery and have been given a prescription for vicoden to alleviate the pain. Last night, shortly after taking a dose, I decided to go over the code a bit more and see what I could find. I was already quite convinced that the error was caused by how I was managing the lifetime of the fxTileMap2D / fxTileLayer2D objects my StaticBlock needed, but the question was how do I dispose of these things gracefully and without (apparently) corrupting the internal state of the game engine? I was quite light-headed, and my thought-process was clearly not the same as usual. This time around, it occured to me to ask "how does fxTileMap2D manage the lifetime of fxTileLayer2D instances?" Aha! Looking at the implementation of

deleteAllTileLayers()

, I found my mistake! In my onRemove method, I was doing this:

delete mBoard;

But what I really needed to be doing was this:

mBoard->deleteObject();

Voila! crashes gone! Vicodin saved my code by softening up my thought processes and giving me back some of the flexibility I had way back when I was learning to program in the first place.

So now I move on to migrating other classes one-by-one. The timing is good because my latest dose has just kicked in.