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[Jonathan S. Fox]

I'm playing my first game in a long time at the moment, and I've noticed one of my guys has a charge for drug dealing despite the fact I've had them do nothing but solicit donations. He's one of my initial six 'proxy' recruits who I use to admin individual cells so that I'm effectively firewalled should any subordinate members be arrested. As such I explicitly will not involve him in criminal activity until he needs juice to recruit, so I was just wondering if this was a bug, a bullshit charge concocted by conservative hackers, a pre-existing warrant (I can't in all honesty say that I checked he was clean when I recruited him) or maybe gang members do things in their spare time, i.e. he was selling some weed on the side. <timbre=conservative> He is a hippy after all. </timbre>

The bold text is the correct guess. Gang members, unlike most characters, often come with pre-existing criminal records, and drug dealing is one of the things they can spawn with.

[Redd]

The bold text is the correct guess. Gang members, unlike most characters, often come with pre-existing criminal records, and drug dealing is one of the things they can spawn with.

Sorry for the way I worded that; he was (is) actually a Hippy. When I said gang members I meant members of my gang. 

[tahujdt]

Awesome, can't wait to try it out. Just th other day, I was wondering why we can't rob banks, and here we are!
Also: Curse you for fixing that attacking police officers bug! That's how I protect my street urchins selling crack!

[dreadmullet]

Oh yeah and while I'm being conservative can I just put the idea out there that the sole method of recruiting, manually walking about looking for people, is a real chore and adds nothing to the game. I think it's fine to have talk/recruit as an option for when you're out and about performing the tactical part of the game, but there should also be a recruitment task that brings in x amount of random potentials based on all the existing variables. That is, I'm not asking for my team to have an easier time, I still think recruitment should bear all the inherent risks involved for wanted criminals to be out and about interfacing with people etc., but it would make the player's experience a lot more enjoyable.

No-one likes dancing around at a juice bar day after day after day looking for impressionable teenagers~

Hmm... other methods of recruiting people seems like a good suggestion.

On one hand, it's not that much of a chore for me. I prefer to cherry pick the very best individuals for my organization. But on the other hand, it makes it extremely tedious to maintain a huge infrastructure with 50+ liberals. Some sort of recruitment activity, but with a player approval process, would be welcome.

[tahujdt]

Sleepers can recruit more sleepers, they just need juice. They get juice if they promote liberalism long enough.

[addictgamer]

Sleepers can recruit more sleepers, they just need juice. They get juice if they promote liberalism long enough.

But that's limited to sleepers. I don't want to make a squad for every hacker/liberal activist I have to fill up their recruit slots. I just want to give them a "recruit" activity, specify who they should look for, and when they find potential recruits, either I do the normal meeting process or they automatically do it if I give the go-ahead (I'd like both, to be honest).

Suggestion: An event log of some sort. I hate accidentally skipping through messages or forgetting something important and having no way to find out what it was.

This has been suggested in a few places and I agree that it would be quite useful. However, going through the entire code to change it so that some messages are sent to the event log would be a tremendous task. There is simply so much text to add, it would take forever.

If I decided to work on this a bit, how would I go about submitting the code? Do I just need to ask for commit access?
Second of all, is there a file anywhere that specifies the programming conventions for this project? Some things are obvious from looking over the code (such as indenting via spaces), but not all things are.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

The bold text is the correct guess. Gang members, unlike most characters, often come with pre-existing criminal records, and drug dealing is one of the things they can spawn with.

Sorry for the way I worded that; he was (is) actually a Hippy. When I said gang members I meant members of my gang. 

Well, as it happens, hippies have a small chance of starting with drug dealing too.

If I decided to work on this a bit, how would I go about submitting the code? Do I just need to ask for commit access?
Second of all, is there a file anywhere that specifies the programming conventions for this project? Some things are obvious from looking over the code (such as indenting via spaces), but not all things are.

Yeah, that's easiest, to just get commit access. Which is pretty straightforward; if you have something useful you'd like to contribute to the project, send me your Sourceforge username.

There isn't a file for code conventions. The only big convention of note is what you've already noticed, stick to three space soft tabs (soft tab = spaces). Three spaces is odd, but LCS is not bound by Conservative conventions of what a tab length ought to be. Beyond that, endeavor to use general good practices and avoid coding by iterative copy-and-paste; just because the game's code is already a mess is no excuse to make it worse.

[addictgamer]

Yeah, that's easiest, to just get commit access. Which is pretty straightforward; if you have something useful you'd like to contribute to the project, send me your Sourceforge username.

There isn't a file for code conventions. The only big convention of note is what you've already noticed, stick to three space soft tabs (soft tab = spaces). Three spaces is odd, but LCS is not bound by Conservative conventions of what a tab length ought to be. Beyond that, endeavor to use general good practices and avoid coding by iterative copy-and-paste; just because the game's code is already a mess is no excuse to make it worse.

Thank you, I have sent you my sourceforge username.

Okay. Yes, I noticed it was three space soft tabs. I wonder if gedit can make the tab key do soft tabs rather than hard tabs...I also noticed that you guys prefer to use Allman for braces? Regardless, I do.
Okay. I'll try not to make it worse.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Okay. Yes, I noticed it was three space soft tabs. I wonder if gedit can make the tab key do soft tabs rather than hard tabs...I also noticed that you guys prefer to use Allman for braces? Regardless, I do.

Most of the code uses curly braces on separate lines, yes, but there's nothing hugely formal about it. My personal style is to occasionally break into 1TBS for small but repetitive if-else statements, if I feel that it improves readability.

[ryan5050]

God a new LCS version?

Fox you make me so fucking happy

[dreadmullet]

I feel I've been following the unwritten code of the LCS source fairly well, which consists of writing an unorganized mess and coming up with terrible variable names.

[addictgamer]

Well, I've committed a logging class. Ya'll have to get used to code that looks like that, as that's what you'll be getting from me.
Now I'll be starting the dreadfully long process of logging events/messages. For all our sakes, please be sure to log any new events/messages you program. Thanks.

The logging format is simple really. I have the gamelog set to automatically append two newlines to a string, if the string does not have that already done, so that the gamelog is ensured some formatting. I chose double newlines rather than only one (or worse case, no automatic newlines leaving it up to the memory of the dev and their whim at that moment, which can lead to who knows what *shiver* ) since I find double newlines in my logs easier to read. That should be changed from a global definition to a variable set by the config, but the current global definition should suffice for now. Just change NEWLINEMODE_GAMELOG from 2 to 1 in includes.h if you want your gamelog only single spaced. Last of all, the game log is saved to in the home directory of lcs, along with the savefile and scorefile.

[dreadmullet]

It would be quite useful if the logging function were integrated nicely. For example, consider this code:

Code: [Select]

move(8,1);
addstr("A sniper takes out ");
addstr(pool[targ]->name);
addstr("!");

How would gamelog.log() fit into here? Should the text be written twice? Yeahno. Should the three calls to addstr() be merged into one after assigning a temporary string? That's reasonable, but seems to go against much of the codebase, and would be extremely tedious.

I propose something like this:

Code: [Select]

gamelog.beginline();
move(8,1);
print("A sniper takes out ");
print(pool[targ]->name);
print("!");
gamelog.endline();

All occurences of "addstr" in the entire codebase would be replaced with "print". print() would call addstr(), and it would also call gamelog.log(). The gamelog.beginline() and gamelog.endline() are there to specify that the text should be added to the log, and only then. This is to fix the problem that all the text printed to the console, like the menus and site view, would go to the log.

[addictgamer]

I propose something like this:

Code: [Select]

gamelog.beginline();
move(8,1);
print("A sniper takes out ");
print(pool[targ]->name);
print("!");
gamelog.endline();

All occurences of "addstr" in the entire codebase would be replaced with "print". print() would call addstr(), and it would also call gamelog.log(). The gamelog.beginline() and gamelog.endline() are there to specify that the text should be added to the log, and only then. This is to fix the problem that all the text printed to the console, like the menus and site view, would go to the log.

D'oh. Yes, I agree with your proposal. I was planning on doing something along those lines, but your idea is much better integrated. I like it.
I'll get to work on it after classes, unless somebody points out a good reason not to do this and to instead use some other method that nobody else has though of yet.

[dreadmullet]

There's something I forgot to mention: your code is too wide. My setup usually consists of two files side by side on a 1920x1200 screen and most of LCS's code fits fine in each viewing area. Much of your code goes on too far, and I have to scroll to read it. That's something to keep in mind.

I'm not saying to fix it just for me, I'm saying that it goes against the coding style of the project.