Well, I’m not sure that plan worked so well. I have been incredibly easy to distract this week, which I am at least partially attributing to having a bit of a stuffed sinus issue going on. A bit pathetic, I grant you, but there you go.
I did manage to get some code done. The front end of the Tasks stuff I’m writing is coming along a bit, so possible tasks get passed through from teh back end, along with the task-appropriate locations, actors and assets. The front end now displays a form for a new task (only when in the correct game stage) with dropdown lists for each of those fields, which change content depending on which task type is selected.
Sadly there is a lot more to do. You can’t really plant a crop until you are either given some in the initial distribution of assets, or can buy it from the market (which needs cash, which needs allocating in the initial distribution of assets). You can’t buy it from the market until the market is stocked (which either needs doing from the start, or the game manager needs to do it and currently they can’t).
There are some other nice-to-haves on the UI front as well. At the moment it’s a plain text situation. Yawn. And it would be nice to see whether a given asset is currently in your stock before you try to assign it. S much more work to be done.
On the bright side, I do now have drop down lists pretty much sorted, and I added events to my form model to allow custom things to happen when fields change. Happy with that.
In writing terms, not much got done! Surprise! I investigated integrating Scrivener with my iPad copy of IAWriter. My problem is a little problem with liking to work offline and the IAWriter Dropbox “integration”. If I am offline when I’m writing (which I prefer – no distractions), and work on a Dropbox doc, when I go back online, IAWriter “helpfully” copies over the work I’ve done offline with my old version from Dropbox. Personally I would expect it to ask me if it can’t work out which is newer, but what do I know? I like IAWriter other than that “feature”, so I’m investigating workarounds. Other than starting to use iCloud, which for some reason I don’t want to do. I think I’d rather keep my cloud data in one place, thanks.
I also went and looked at the notes I was trying to take on papers, based on a form suggested by Wallace and Wray in their book “Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates”. The problem is that without the book on hand I can’t remember what half the questions meant, so I don’t think that’s going to be a long-term option! I shall have to rethink.
Next week I am off to a conference. I’m not expecting to get a huge amount of PhD work done, but if I do have some spare time I want to plan the next chunk of code I’m going to write. Next week I’ll hopefully post a round up of the conference. Fingers crossed, anyway!
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