Production Post 5 : I'M DROWNING IN RATIOS

The ocean level. The fucking ocean level. My god, my god, what have I done. There was a point where the ocean level worked fine and nobody really cared that you couldn't change the overall level time. The world was rose-colored and life was worth living. That all changed when we wanted to be able to change the overall level time.

The level functions along the same principles of object-state design I talked about in my last post, with the following managing enum:

The FLOOD states indicate that the waves are rising, and the DRAIN states indicate that the waves are falling. Below is a gif of the ocean level with the level time sped up:

The short rises and falls are what the MINI refers to, while the overall flood or drain are what the FLOOD and DRAIN refer to. I needed to relate the overall level time with the time for each of the above states. So, I made a public variable to decide what percentage of the level the FLOOD would take relative to the DRAIN (see how the drain takes longer than the flood? That was a major pain to accomplish in units of mini rises and falls). Then, I made another public variable to relate the distance a mini fall would cover compared to a mini rise. These variables were made with the FLOOD in mind, because a DRAIN is just an anti-FLOOD in the code (with a few caveats).

I'll post this here, but you shouldn't read it really. It demonstrates the ridiculousness required just to get the correct variables to make this thing work (that was half the battle, I'll admit, and it was very uphill).

That was fun to work out. All of those variables were absolutely necessary, though. I had to relate every single type of interpolation time and distance to each other using the rations, and make sure the entire monstrosity took exactly <LEVEL_TIME> seconds. It was a labor of love, and totally worth it, because the ocean level actually works with the rest of the game.

I'm not going to post any more code, as it is pretty repetitive going down, but because of that initialize function, the level runs off of just four major state functions: HandleFloodMiniRise(), HandleFloodMiniFall(), HandleDrainMiniRise(), and HandleDrainMiniFall().

I remember writing all this crap: I made a lot of hand gestures to think about these ratios and how they fit into the level as a whole. shudder