Legacy Code Strikes Again...

By: Matthew Steinhardt 

As we come down to the wire to get everything implemented, the mouseover UI for the tower information was still being developed. After the implementation was pushed to the main project, it was apparent there was a problem. Oddly, enough the overlay system didn't seem to work when the player mouses over towers that were loaded in from a save state. Upon further investigation, it became apparent that a mysterious "TowerData" structure was not being saved/populated properly on towers loaded from a save state. 

This was rather perplexing as this TowerData structure wasn't used in any other tower system. I tracked down used references in Unreal Engine and found out that it was a legacy system put in during the first weeks of development while trying to figure out a way to pass some simple data between the Tower Bar UI and the icons. Unfortunately, this system was largely abandoned in place of our better Data Asset implementation. 

It turned out that the TowerData object was a wrapper class around the TowerInfo data table which kept a very basic list of our towers, names, icon, etc. This was meant to just be used in the "TowerSelected" event to trigger creating a tower for placement. Somewhere along the way, this TowerData class was added to the base Tower class as well and was then used in the overlay system instead of our new Data Asset system.

So the question became: Do we completely rewrite the overlay system to utilize the data asset system, or do we try and support the legacy code and bandage it up? Due to the time constraints, I opted to go with the latter. It proved to be slightly more time consuming than anticipated. I ended up having to add the data structure to the save system and save it for every tower. Then during load, I applied that data to the wrapper class. 


The struct is duplicated and stored for each tower unfortunately...

The moral of the story here is: always expect people to find old code and use it in ways you don't anticipate. Some extra time upfront removing legacy systems would have prevented this. But such is the way of things when you're constantly on a tight crunch schedule.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

UI Polish

Image
 Author: Yashwant Patel The main thing that our game was missing in the last week was polish on certain things. One of the largest thing that we were missing was replacing the placeholder with final UI assets. This would make the game feel more complete and the player would appreciate the game with a finished UI. Since I was working on UI I had an advantage, because I didn't have to go around searching for UI packs since finding assets that you exactly want can be hard. Instead I mostly made everything from scratch with the exception of some elements that I got from freepik.com  and modified them to what we needed. The main challenge I faced with the UI was getting everything how I liked. I didn't really use Unreal's tools for UI before in terms of properly structuring the hierarchy for UI elements and properly wrapping everything to have it behave how you want it to, so this took a day to get used to. Another thing that needed to be done was reprogram the UI since the old ...
Read more

AI Navigation Problems - Yashwant Patel

Image
Problem In Island Defenders we want our AI to go down a lane to reach the core. Ideally the AI should navigate through the lane in a way where they don't cut corners to try and optimize the path they take in order to reach the Island Core. The path finding algorithm is implemented in a way to have the AI reach the destination using the quickest path while keeping obstacles in mind. For most games this would make for good AI, since you want AI to take the most efficient path. In our case we want the AI to always be in the center of the lane even if that path is not the most optimal. This wouldn't affect the user's gameplay physically, but it would seem like an odd behavior to have AI cutting corners in a game like this. For example, if you have a racing game and the AI cuts through the middle of the map in order to go from one point to another it wouldn't make sense. Even though that is the most optimal path in terms of pathfinding it's not the correct path. This is ...
Read more

Round End Cutscene Implementation

Image
 Author: Yashwant Patel Problem: Before the very first round and in between each round the player has access to the upgrade system where they can spend the currency they earn to purchase upgrades. Currently the player has no idea about the upgrades since they aren't told about them. One thing that can help mitigate this problem is to have a "cutscene" at the end of each round that shows a ship arriving with supplies (upgrades). This would help mitigate the main problem and it also solves the mystery of where the upgrades are arriving from. The objective is clear, but how should it be executed? Could use Unreal's level sequencer to make an animation and then render it and play the video once the round ends. Another way would be to have a "dynamic cutscene". Sounds fancy, but what does this mean? Essentially it means that each round end cutscene would be unique. How can that be accomplished and why attempt it in the first place? The main problem with setting u...
Read more