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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

A few days ago I had told you that I'm stopping with making the police station in my game Dani's Race because it had a Spaghetti Code Problem. The main() function in the Main_Update.py file was 1683 lines of code long and contained way too many things in it. At the moment, the same function is down to 641 lines of code. This is still way too much stuff in the main() but this is a hell of a lot of reduction.

Racing Code

After the article I worked on cleaning the main() function by myself and documented some of it on Dani's Race Matrix Chatroom. This is when I moved pretty much the majority of the racing code out of main() and into Racing.py.

I did not simply dumped the code from main() into an equally stupid spaghetti code thing in Racing.py. Instead I've broken it up into 13 individual functions, which are now useful to do various interesting things that weren't possible before.




There is a point in the first story mission where Moria sits into a car you bring her and goes on practicing the racetrack. To do this in the Script.py I had to manually fool the system to think that Moria is now a part of the race.

if Story["Moria"].get("driving"):

    racepos = [-61.7856, 1028, 0]

    # Moria drive the car to the race
            
    if Story["Moria"]["driving"].getDistanceTo(racepos) > 2 and "Moria-Practicing" not in Story:
        Story["Moria"]["driving"]["npc"] = "story"
        Story["Moria"]["driving"]["target"] = racepos
        Vehicle.TargetedNPC(Story["Moria"]["driving"])

    # Moria racing the race
                
    elif "Moria-Practicing" not in Story:
        Story["Moria"]["driving"]["race"] = "RacetrackRace"
        Story["Moria"]["driving"]["npc"]  = "racer"
        Story["Moria"]["driving"]["racing"] = True
        Story["Moria-Practicing"] = True

But now I have a specific function StartRace() which can start any race even without Dani being a part of it.

def StartRace(racename, dani=None):

    
    race = Races()[racename]
    race["started"] = True
    race["start-time"] = bge.logic.getRealTime()

    # Deleting starters
    for starter in race["starters"]:
        if starter["cylinder"]:
            DeleteCylinder(starter, ignoreTimer=True)

    # Making the racers race
    for racer in race["racers"]:

        racer["racing"] = True
        racer["launchtime"] = 100
        racer["race"] = racename
        
        # Testing
        racer["npc"] = "racer"
        racer["active"] = False

        # Beam of energy
        racer["beam"] = Reuse.Create("Racer.Indicator")

    # If the race includes dani.
    if dani:
        dani["race"] = racename
        dani["checkpoint"] = 0   
        dani["lap"] = 0
        

        # Make the racing UI visible
        scene = bge.logic.getCurrentScene()
        pointer = scene.objects["PointingArrow"]
        posindicator = scene.objects["Dani_Pos_Indicator"]
        timeindicator = scene.objects["Dani_Time_Indicator"]
        lapindicator = scene.objects["Dani_Lap_Indicator"]
        
        posindicator.visible = True
        pointer.visible = True
        timeindicator.visible = True
        lapindicator.visible = True

        # Play the start the race sound.
        bge.logic.globalDict["SoundDevice"].play(bge.logic.globalDict["sounds"]["active"]["sound"]) # Play a Ding

This theoretically gives me an ability ( with a minor modification ) to make racing in the city happen in the background. Like once every so often you would be able to stumble upon street racers doing their racing by themselves. Which sounds like it could be a lot of fun and could give the game a bit more life.

In the same time making the functions smaller gave me an ability to look at them more carefully and it made me fix two long lasting bugs: Bug #26 and Bug #29.

The thing causing both of those bugs was a rather sloppy implementation of the car's spawning. For example, you may drive pass a racing event, for which the race driver cars would spawn. And then you may continue a little bit further, making one of the cars de-spawn and re-spawn again as a car on the road, which is no longer a race car, but which still was recorded in the metadata of the race as a race car in the race. Which you can probably guess did some problems.




Also if a car spawned for the race it would not spawn ever again, for some reason, if you go further from the race. Forcing you to restart the game if you want to play the same race twice.

One friend of mine was playing the story mode and one mission required going to a race. But he chose to pass through the race starting zone when going through the previous part in the story. The cars spawned and then when the story needed it to be a race, refused to spawn again, making everything break. So cleaning the main() actually helped the game be a bit less buggy, since I saw all those mistakes and fixed them along the way.

Here is a recording of my PeerTube livestream where I finished moving the code of the racing. And where I discovered and fixed some of the bugs.







By the way, subscribing to the RSS of this website will not only give you new articles, but also notify you when I am streaming on PeerTube.

The rest of the main

Further I had to move all kinds of other code, such as optimization code and code for doors and elevators. Some of which I did during the livestream that I linked above.

Later I tried doing another livestream where I tried cleaning the code, but I was tired as hell and so it became a stupid ADHD-fest where I ended up working on the Police Station instead, in the end, because I couldn't concentrate on the code.







But, then even later I actually streamed again, this time with proper energy and concentration and moved elevators, doors and a lot of optimization code out of main(). Here is the recording of that stream:







In the same time I broke main() itself into a few functions, separating it into main(), Init() which runs in the first frame of the game and OnExit() which runs when you close the game. The Init() itself is also not just a copy-paste from what there was in the main() but rather I broken off some of the initialization into Racing.py, Doors.py, Elevators.py and Opt.py. Leaving only just a few if statements in the Init():

for object in scene.objects:

	if "spawn" in object:
		Vehicle.RegisterSpawnPoint(object)

	if str(object.name).startswith("Crate"):
		crates = bge.logic.globalDict["garage-crates"]
		crates.append(object)

	if "LightSpawn" in object:
		Opt.RegisterObjects(object, spawnAtDistance, "LightSpawn")
            
	elif type(object.blenderObject.data) == bpy.types.AreaLight:
		Opt.RegisterObjects(object, spawnAtDistance, "AreaLamp")

	elif "Tree" in object.name:
		Opt.RegisterObjects(object, spawnAtDistance, "Tree")
	
	elif "Palm" in object.name:
		Opt.RegisterObjects(object, spawnAtDistance, "Palm")

	elif "Elevator" in object:
		Elevators.RegisterElevator(object)
            
	elif "Door" in object:
		Doors.RegisterDoor(object)

	elif "ambiance-sound" in object:
		bge.logic.globalDict["sound-ambiances"].append(object)

I could have made functions to precalculate all those things in some sort of way that would look like this in Init():

Opt.Precalculate()
Doors.Precalculate()
Elevators.Precalculate()

But I decided against that, because it would have required looping over all those objects multiple times and the game has a lot of them. Even if it only happens on the first frame. The first frame is already a bit too slow, so to optimize it a bit I made one loop in the Init() and call functions based of the object type from there.

Petition

I just want to remind you that there is a petition going on for the game and it is taking a bit long. Please, if you have a fediverse account, make sure to sign that petition so that this "already old" version could be released and a new petition with all those improvements could be started.

Happy Hacking!!!



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