World Map

The World Map is the central component of the simulation. The class itself consists of a grid and a set of JSON settings. The grid consists of a dictionary of type <Location, Cell>.

Cells

A cell has the following components:

• location - (x, y) pairs that can be added together, serialized, compared, etc.
• avatars - see Game Objects for more details
• pickup - see Game Objects for more details
• cell content - the cell content can either be a score cell, an obstacle or a plain floor cell
• fog of war
• actions - an array where the intended actions of different avatars are registered and, afterwards, applied

World Map basic functionality

World Map has a lot of misc functionality, as multiple other objects communicate with it and need a simple API.

Cell specific functionality:

• get_cell
• all_cells
• score_cells
• pickup_cells

Map dimension functionality:

• is_on_map
• max_x
• max_y
• min_x
• min_y
• num_cols
• num_rows
• num_cells

The Update Cycle

The most important responsibility of the world map class is the self update after the intended character moves have been recored by the turn manager. The function udpate is called by the Turn Manager.

This functionality is quite broad and could be considered for refactoring in a different class.

The update cycle is as follows:

• update avatars
  • apply score: each avatar received a score
  • apply pickups: each avatar grabs a pickup if present
• update map:
  • expand the map so that it fits the size of the avatars if more avatars arrive
  • reset score locations: new score locations are generated
  • add pickups: new pickups are generated

All the map updates are regulated using the settings of a map. Some useful settings fields are:

• TARGET_NUM_CELLS_PER_AVATAR - probably the most important setting for a map; it regulates the size of the map by number of avatars; to make the map static, we override it for the levels
• TARGET_NUM_SCORE_LOCATIONS_PER_AVATAR - used to regulate the number of score locations; the new score locations are generated randomly and added to the map
• SCORE_DESPAWN_CHANCE - another parameter to regulate the score cells generation; the game is more dynamic as some score cells are getting removed each turn and new ones are generated, giving the player the impressing of score cells moving around
• TARGET_NUM_PICKUPS_PER_AVATAR - regulate the number of pickups similarly to how the number of score locations are regulated
• PICKUP_SPAWN_CHANCE - a regulation parameter similar to SCORE_DESPAWN_CHANCE

All of this settings should be overrided in a level to fit the needs of the level design. More documentation on levels can be found here.

Dependencies and other functionality

Dependencies:

• update - used by TurnManager to update the world at each frame
• clear_cell_actions - used by TurnManager to tell WorldMap to clear actions
• cells_to_create - used by WorldState to retreive the cells to view; used to know when to instantiate objects in the scene

Misc:

• get_random_spawn_location - get a free habitable cell or IndexError
• can_move_to - assert if avatar can move to location
• attackable_avatar - return the avatar attackable at the given location, or None

Most of the misc functions generate coupling with many other classes, making this class reasonably hard to decouple.