Block 3

January 22nd, 2009

19:00 Stuff came up on Sunday so I decided to delay this block until Thursday to see how well developing live would work. I will comment when this is done. Today's goal is very simple. I want to get the head to head game fully implemented. If that takes significantly less than 3 hours, then I will start on the AI code.

20:20 Got the bidder dialog functional but I really don't like it so am going to think things over a bit and try to come up with a better way of doing this. The original version, which is being scrapped, simply let you use a set of four buttons to increase or decrease the bid amount by units of 1 or 100. It is simply too clumsy.

21:50 Digital dialog with each digit being settable separately. This is much nicer to work with than the original method and I really do regret that I did not do this right away. I essentially waisted about an hour worth of time creating the bidder dialog twice. Still, at this point the game is practically done so I don't have to worry too much about getting the game finished in time so taking the extra time to get the game playing nice is worth it.

22:30 I spent a bit of time fixing the down button bug that the new bidder dialog had. This was an obvious 10 seconds to fix bug that took me way too long to find. The bug was simply that I was examining the wrong group of buttons when I was trying to find out which button generated the click as I have all the down buttons grouped to the same event handler. I then wrote a function for getting the bid value for game. Finally, I changed the title screen to reflect the actual block that this work is part of.

Deciding not to post tonight but will post tomorrow. Don't think live Thursdays are realistic. In fact, I am not sure that the block method of development is working for me. I will finish off this episode in one final work block (probably on Sunday January 25th) but I think that the third episode will be developed in a different way. Not exactly sure how, yet, but I am sure I will think of something.