Better document parameters of Programmer puzzle pieces
bartico6 opened this issue ยท 0 comments
Describe the feature
What each parameter/side does in puzzles isn't immediately obvious, neither is it well explained in the Patchouli book provided. Same applies to special variables like $drone_pos. Update: no it doesn't apply, it's in the book and I missed it.
Take the following example "wait for targets in safezone" snippet of a drone program implementing base defense:
The fact that p1 is top-right, and p2 is mid-right isn't immediately obvious - as a similar operation defining two corners using a coordinate operator looks like this
Similarly, which path the program takes in conditions (on eval true it takes label on the right, on eval false it takes label on the left, if one isn't present falls through to block below) also isn't immediately obvious, and warnings are not raised for having blocks attached to the bottom of a conditional with both true/false labels filled, like this:
This should absolutely raise a warning, if not hard error - as it is "unreachable code".
Reasons why it should be considered
Programming drones in PNC is unclear and confusing, even to people with a programming background, as trying to implement something interesting using the programmer requires you to trial/error with the programming puzzles a lot, check mod source code, or look it up online. Functionality of blocks and parameters should be in-built into the programmer UI - the tooltip of the puzzle should tell you what each parameter is and does.
This would make programming drones accessible to more players without watering it down ( especially those who are otherwise talented, but unwilling to seek out source of the mod just to understand the puzzles, if they can just use a different machine in their modpack to achieve the same result ;-) )
Additional details
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