Coding Frustrations and Space Battles

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Coding can be an extraordinarily painful, irritating thorn in ones side sometimes. Tonight it feels as though my only consolation is that experienced coders go through the same thing, and my unfailing passion for technology.
I say this because the track parser I’ve been implementing into S Quad Racing is not turning out the way I want it to. Basically, the procedure I want the program to initiate when a player selects a track is as follows:

  • Open the file that corresponds to the track that was selected. For example, if the player chose Beginner, the game would load tracks\Beginner.track into memory.
  • Read through the text of the file. It would then:
    -set the track size as determined in the file.
    -set spawning of obstacles properties such as how fast they would appear, and the maximum number that was allowed.
    -Finally, the turns and straight sections would be generated, laying out the track structure.

  • After all of this, the idea is that players would start the game, and be placed on the track that they selected, exactly as it was structured.

However, as is the main focus of my frustration, I’m encountering some major mishaps. On the first three or four compilation trials, I couldn’t even get the game to load the track file. Rather, it would create a file called “0” with no file extension inside the tracks directory, and attempt to read from that instead. The result was a barren, completely straight track that, if raced upon, would likely last forever, as there were no defined finish line boundaries set. And though the player could move forward, the enemy could not. Instead, he would just sit there at the beginning of the lap, winning first and second place, thus eliminating the player’s chance of winning. 😛
After tweaking the code, and by that I mean changing two characters of it, I resolved this issue. However, I still cannot, get turns working, no matter what I try, and ever since I implemented this system, obstacles refuse to spawn.
Though it might seem almost hopeless, there is some good news. As has already been mentioned, God has given me the blessing of having a best friend who is quite efficient when it comes to audio game coding. In the coming days, I will be examining the code for his snowboard racing game. Hopefully, this will help me come up with a working solution to this issue.
Once this blows over, I will look into adding more environmental features such as rain pockets, road hazards, power ups, wall sections, and perhaps some more turn types. Stay tuned!
In other news, I’ve had a rather active week on Death Match a New Beginning, engaging in some intents battles with pirate ships of various hull strengths, one of which rendered my ship useless for 35 hours. Since I spawned all of the enemies I fought this week, I was able to give them creative names. Vladdiator, Chad Dungie, and Virwag14 were just some of the names I came up with, the latter being the most recent battle I was involved in.
In fact, after Virwag14 was destroyed, I founded a colony in its honor. But the twisted thing is, I docked the very ship that was used to kill Virwag14 the ship, on the barren grasslands of Virwag14 the planet. 🙂
That concludes the posting for tonight. The next time you will be hearing from me is on Podcast Episode 34, when I will be performing a bounty mission on Death Match. and once again, Danny will most certainly be there!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

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