Alright, I’m in. I’ve got a case of iced coffee drinks and a clear schedule for the weekend. Looking forward to this.

Also, I learned a really neat trick today (just in time for LD) and thought I’d share. In an earlier post during the “advancing wall” contest, I mentioned my experiment with trying to tune the gameplay using automatically reloading config files. That didn’t really work out so well, it worked but it was too much of a pain to add each new value to the config file. I think I only had one or two in the end. Waste of time.

But… Ben Garney, who inspired the  approach in the first place, commented and pointed me to this thread which discusses a really neat way to handle this.

Click the image to expand to readable size.

Basically, everywhere you put a constant that you want to tune, you can instead use a macro like _TV( 4.2 ) instead. The _TV stands for tweakable value. In a release build it does nothing, but in a debug build, it checks if the source file changed and updates automagically.  You can see a simple example of usage in the screenshot, I’m editing and saving the values in the source, and the printfs in the console reflect the changes.

I just hacked this together so it’s probably a little flaky, it’s pretty much untested.  It should work on linux as well, if you’re using gcc 4.3 or above, but I haven’t tried it yet.  I’ve added this to my ld code dump, you just need the .h and .cpp file if you want to try it, or you can probably roll your own.