Much of my project brainpower this week was spent examining the existing view hierarchy for Brainium Mahjong and thinking about where the Board Editor will fit in and what its own view hierarchy should look like.
At a very basic level, the Mahjong view hierarchy looks something like this:
Starting from the root node and working my way down the tree, I pretty quickly determined that the BoardEditorView should sit at the same functional level as the GameView and should be inserted into the overall view hierarchy at this point. The resulting view hierarchy would now look something like this:
With this decided, the next step was to figure out where in the existing application would be the best entry point for accessing the Board Editor. In certain project builds there are menus for debugging that are accessed in different ways, but that logic didn’t seem appropriate for the Board Editor. In my mind I saw the access point for the Board Editor being a button that would then transport the designer to a clean backdrop display with a simple GUI for adding and removing tiles to create a new board design. Tinkering within the Mahjong app and inspecting the Toolbar, the ideal access point became clear–adding another button to the bottom of the Game menu.
Having successfully built the project in Xcode, it was time to tinker with the MainView to add a Board Editor button to the Game Menu. I began by skimming the MainView.cpp file for how it implemented the Achievements button and began adding code to create the Board Editor button.
This might be time to mention one important aspect of the Board Editor project. Since this tool lives within the actual Mahjong project and will soon be merged with the main branch, anything related to the Board Editor implementation needs to be written within #if BOARD_EDITOR…#endif to ensure that the Board Editor can only be accessed from a specific Board Editor build or when the “BoardEditor” build configuration is selected in Xcode. Although this can be laborious and seems to dirty the code a bit in cases of numerous #if..#endif guards, the majority of the implementation will be in separate board editor files with a single #if..#endif at the top and bottom of the file.
With some mimicry of existing code and frequent visitation to the Xcode error messages when trying to build, eventually I got a working button added to the Game Menu that when clicked, for the time being, saves the game state and slides the Game Menu down.
Next up I’ll be coding the BoardEditorView to open to the selected user Backdrop with no tiles displayed, a tile counter at the top of the screen, and two buttons for adding and removing tiles.
Worth celebrating:
- Made a new branch “board_editor” and initial commits to the project
- Successfully created the Board_Editor build configuration and got the project building in Xcode!
- Began fleshing out the view hierarchy for the Board Editor (read this post)
- Selected logical UI entry point within the Mahjong project for the Board Editor to be accessed (Toolbar -> Game Menu -> Board Editor)
- Added BoardEditorView to the view hierarchy
- Added the Board Editor as an app on App Center for builds to be accessed by internal teams
