No updates in a while, but it hasn’t been for lack of progress (relatively speaking). This post will more be for those of you who are interested in the programming side of things… ie. lots of text, no pics.
After 100,000+ lines of code, much more if you count deleted/restarted lines of code, it was time to take a step back and look at the structure of my program. Things were getting a bit messy and, it seemed to me, overly complicated. I had been doing some reading lately on software design patterns (half because of this project, half because I think it’s something I might be interested in doing for money one day) and while reading through the different patterns, I was interested to see that without really knowing it I had drifted towards what is called the Model-View-Controller pattern. I won’t add to many details about what an MVC pattern is (there’s lots of info on the web), other than to say that it became pretty clear to me why things were getting messy, and what I needed to do to fix it. It requires re-writing a bit of code, but not excessively so.
The other major thing I’d been looking at was the interface. As monitor resolutions grow, the fixed-window style of GDS and Wolverine Studios sims began to bug me. Early on I realised why they opt to go this way, and why it's not as straight forward to make a program that will 'stretch' to fit your selected resolution, like with any graphical video game you play.
I spent some time the last couple of weeks thinking of ways around it - Qt (the UI framework I'm using) has layouts which are made for exactly the purpose of resizing components to fit a screen. The problem is they don't really suit a program like this IMO, and objects on the screen stretch and shrink and look ugly. For general purpose desktop apps I think it works great, but not for this. So I've decided to stick with what I've got so far, which is a a fixed-window, though in the standard 'widescreen' size of 1280x720 pixels. I'm going to push on with this with the idea that if I want to improve on this later, all of my presentation logic can be replaced without touching anything else (this relates directly back to the MVC stuff above).
As far as the actual simulator goes, I haven't done a great deal of work for a while because I know how it's going to work. There's no problem to solve (unlike quite a few other areas), so I haven't been focusing on it as much. I have been looking at schedules, trying to make it as flexible as I can. Initially there will be two types of schedules - round-robin, and your NBA-styled 82 game schedules. I have a good idea of how to generate both, just ironing out a few wrinkles right now.