zardon - Developer IT

Creating a newspaper that effects the game's economy?

- by zardon

I am writing a game in Objective C/cocos2d where a newspaper is a central part of what controls or rather effects the game's world economy as well as what a city might do (such as increase X, reduce Y) The newspaper is a bit like a "Chance card" in Monopoly, it has an effect on something. My question is, what is the best way to do write a newspaper that has both a random and specific effect within the game. Would the best strategy be to write out all the things a newspaper can affect, a PLIST of headlines (with placeholders). I think Tiny Tower uses a PLIST of events and it randomly picks an event, but I'm not sure how it actually parses it because certain events do different things. But then how do I parse all the scenarios that a newspaper can deliver? A big switch statement seems very long and complicated to do. I am wondering if there is a simpler way to handle this kind of thing. Related to this is that there might be no news that day and I'm not sure what the newspaper should display, should it just display the last headline? So, in summary. 1) A newspaper generates a headline, it affects different things, such as the world economy, prices, how city reacts 2) I need the newspaper to generate headlines (although there may be days when there are no headlines at all), but I am not sure how to parse it without using a big-ass switch statement. Thanks in advance.

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How to expose game data in the game without a singelton?

- by zardon

I'm quite new to cocos2d and games programming, and am currently I am writing a game that is currently in Prototype stage. Everything is going okay, but I've realized a potentially big problem and I am not sure how to solve it. I am using a singelton to store a bunch of arrays for everything, a global list of planets, a global list of troops, a global list of products, etc. And only now I'm realizing that all of this will be in memory and this is the wrong way to do it. I am not storing files or anything on the disk just yet, with exception to a save/load state, which is a capture of everything. My game makes use of a map which allows you to select a planet, then it will give you a breakdown of that planets troops and resources, Lets use this scenario: My game has 20 planets. On which you can have 20 troops. Straight away that's an array of 400! This does not add the NPC, which is another 10. So, 20x10 = 200 So, now we have 600 all in arrays inside a Singelton. This is obviously very bad, and very wrong. Especially as the game scales in the amount of data. But I need to expose pretty much everything, especially on the map page, and I am not sure how else to do it. I've been told that I can use a controller for the map page which has the information I need for each planet, and other controllers for other items I require global display for. I've also thought about storing each planet's data in a save file, using initWithCoder however there could be a boatload of files on the user's device? I really don't want to use a database, mainly because I would need to translate NSObjects and non-NSObjects like CGRects and CGPoints and Colors into/from SQL. I am open to other ideas on how to store and read game data to prevent using a singelton to store everything, everywhere. Thanks for your time.

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Creating Gun objects with upgrades?

- by zardon

I have a series of guns in my game. I use the Gun class/object like this: (Just an example) @interface Gun : NSObject { NSString *name; // Six-shooter NSNumber *cost; NSNumber *clipPrice; // ie: 700 NSNumber *clipCapacity; // 6 NSNumber *ammoCapacity; // 6 NSNumber *damage; // 0-10 NSNumber *accuracy; // 0-10 NSNumber *fireRate; // 0-10 NSNumber *range; // 0-10 // Not sure if I have all the stats, but this is fine for now } Lets say I want to have 3 upgrades per gun. My problem is I am not sure how to do this. Examples: increase fire-rate increase range increase accuracy silencer double ammo capacity (ie: Drum) double clip capacity (ie: Taped magazine) Thus my question is, I'd like to implement an upgrade system to guns but I am not sure how to do it. Would there be an Upgrade object which is a child to the Gun class, or would it be seperate class altogether. Thanks for your time.

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How to do a UITable cell with triangle indicator?

- by zardon

In the Linked in iphone application I noticed that they have a tableview, see the following picture with what appears to have a triangle indicator pointing upwards. Notice how the tableview cell has a little triangle pointing upwards and is part of a tableview cell. The triangle is the ---^--- part of the image. I'm wondering. How do you make a UITableView with this triangle indicator, and what is this effect called? Thanks

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(Django) Trim whitespaces from charField

- by zardon

How do I strip whitespaces (trim) from the end of a charField in Django? Here is my Model, as you can see I've tried putting in clean methods but these never get run. I've also tried doing name.strip(), models.charField().strip() but these do not work either. Is there a way to force the charField to trim automatically for me? Thanks. class Employee(models.Model): """(Workers, Staff, etc)""" name = models.CharField(blank=True, null=True, max_length=100) # This never gets run def clean_variable(self): data = self.cleaned_data['variable'].strip() return data def __unicode__(self): return self.name class Meta: verbose_name_plural = 'Employees' # This never gets run either class EmployeesForm(forms.ModelForm): class Meta: model = Employee def clean_description(self): #if not self.cleaned_data['description'].strip(): # raise forms.ValidationError('Your error message here') self.cleaned_data['name'].strip()

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