Reading the Big Book of Basic Stuff

So, this is kind of a technical devlog. The fun thing about working on Holocene is to combine my creative spirit, being a historian and learning a partially new craft. I work for a software company and I program business applications with databases and interfaces to influence whatever is in there. It's programming and it helps develop the way of thinking that I can't explain to my mother. On the other hand, while Java, Python, Javascript, Lua, C# etc are kind of alike, I'm working with a different kind of framework, much more high level than those others, even when Unity is actually doing much of the high level stuff for me. Learning to work with Unity and C# is an interesting journey for me.

I'm getting the basics as we go, but sometimes I have trouble fully getting grip of object oriented programming, I guess. I find myself having to rewrite stuff because I need it again in another context. For instance, I have this snippet for a gatherer to find where the drop-off building is and then where to go, because Navmesh agents can't walk into objects that it would walk around. I thought I needed that just for this purpose or at least for strongly related ones. I was wrong.

With the recruitment of units working, I needed a way to place them around the barracks. So what I did yesterday was kind of weird. I put the unit on top of the rally point, made it find out where the object of the barracks is and where is the nearest edge of that collider is, move the position directly to that position and then have the unit walk to the rally point. Because it worked and I just wanted it to work, I called it a day, but today is another day.

I am finding out how to use methods in a context where they do not have to have any specific kind of object involved. For that I have found out that static classes are useful. They can hold methods and global variables that you might need in any context. For now, they hold stuff about the size of the screen and other such things. From today on, I will populate it with methods that are generic. For instance, enter a position and the method returns whatever object is there (if there is one). Enter an object and the method will find out what are the edges of it.

My aim is to have this all grouped in a well-arranged way so that I always know where to find those information-gatherers. I'm sure that I will end up with a long script, but it's a script specifically designed for that purpose. I'll probably have it be a special script to distinguist from the screen size stuff. Tomorrow, I'll rerun all my scripts to find if there are such generic methods and variables that I need anywhere and then I'll put that in the script. I don't want every unit to have its own (identical) way of finding the entrance of a building. I just want to tell the unit to look for it in the Big Book of Basic Stuff (BBBS for short).