(Godot) Inventory
I’m happy to say that I’m once again, gainfully employed. The project that I will be working is very interesting and is not related to graphics nor video games. This will reduce the time that I have to play around with Godot and other technologies. I will keep this blog alive, showing off small improvements and ideas. I spent the last week trying out the UI facilities in Godot as well as the database concepts that it offers.
Inventory
In my personal project, as of today, when you press the ‘I’ key, you have shown the following dialog:
Working with the UI elements in Godot was straight-forward. With a few mouse clicks and no reading of documentation, I had a working split-window in a transparent, modeless dialog!
Modality
Godot’s input map is very global, while a UI-dedicated technology like Qt propagates input events through the tree of widgets. This means that introducing modality of the Inventory dialog was tricky. I took me a first hours of meditation to figure out how to properly introduce modality. I decided to introduce a LocalPlayer singleton class that would restrict inputs. Maybe the LocalPlayer singleton class could also be useful if I want to experiment with co-operative gameplay, later?
Database
A few weeks ago, I did some challenges in SQL on HackerRank.com. A few of the companies that I was in discussion with, had mentionned that SQL was important to them. As well as some SQL query challenges, I reviewed the basics of relational databases, primary keys, foreign keys, natural keys…
When I coded the first version of the Inventory class, I used strings to identify what type of stuff was contained in the Inventory. I knew, from the start, that a string was not expressive enough to make an interesting UI. Last week, I introduced the Commodity class to describe each stuff that could be contained in an inventory. Then, I promptly added a CommodityDatabase singleton class to contain all the possible commodities. I kept the string as a key, so the Inventory class remained intact. In order for the player to build a hut, I introduced the ConstructionProject class and the Building class. A ConstructionProject object uses commodities as inputs and a Building object as output. I wrote a first draft of the ConstructionProjectDatabase singleton class and the BuildingDatabase singleton class before I scrapped them. I did not want to have to code two new classes everytime that I introduced a new type of possible data.
That’s when I realized that I was designing a relational database. I hesistated using the SQLite wrapper for Godot. I think using SQLite would eventually have made writing save-games easier, but its drawback is that extending the Database would have been harder. Also, I won’t pretend that my personal projects are complex enough to need the memory paging abilities of a SQL database engine. I settled to use the JSON parsing built-in to the Godot engine. As with a lot of building blocks in the Godot engine, it was surprisingly pleasant to use. In about 20 lines of C++ code, my project iterates over all the .json files of a specific folder, reads them and adds their data to the Database singleton class.