I need a better bike... xD (Patreon)

[Abelius]: Hi there,

Last week I fell off the bike due to some stupid gravel. Pretty unavoidable as my old motorcycle doesn't have ABS. It was a matter of choosing between braking on it and going down, or not touching the handle and entering the nearby roundabout and let the cars hit me, so...

Both me and the bike are okay, but that event was the last straw in how I felt lately about the whole business of going in a daily basis to the co-working office to get things done. I went there because I thought I would be better off than in my own home office. As many of you know by now, I have two little children that make a lot of noise when they return from school...

However, even if my focus has been a lot better than at home, there are several reasons because I ended up deciding to give up that place and returning home. Hitting the ground because that area looks like third world industrial park (where if not you'd find gravel on the damned road?) was only the final one for me taking my things and leaving.

So, I've changed my schedule, trying to do the majority of work in the mornings to minimize the time I spend trying to focus while my girls try to perforate my eardrums. But thankfully, I have now a secret weapon... I've bought some state of the art noise-cancelling headphones, and it's incredible how well they isolate me from the background noise. I wish I had thought of that in the first place!

Anyway, these past days I've been working on optimizing code. State machines to be more precise. As some of you know I'm making LOKR with plugins and the most important one is PlayMaker, which is a state machine-based visual scripting "language". Thing is, I've tried to make those FSMs (Finite State Machine) as modular as possible, but I wasn't too successful until my understanding and experience grew.

And there are a lot of them of all kinds and purposes. For example, this is the one I'm using for eye blinking:

If that's for something so simple as that, just imagine the rest. ^_^

Nevertheless, and as I've said in my previous post, this is something I need to do before the game gets more complex.

My objective here is to make FSMs that just work the same regardless of the character object they're assigned to. And if some change is needed in the future I could just edit the template and copy+paste it to all NPCs in the game in just some clicks.

But that requires time to think, not caring about deadlines looming over your head that lead to those "just do this for now" bad practices.

To be honest, I'm having fun. Seeing how the new FSMs work on their own it's very rewarding. It almost makes me feel like a real coder, ha ha!

So, this is what I can tell you guys for now. I'll try to make a weekly post on Mondays just for keeping you on the loop, even if there's not much to say, okay?

Thank you for reading!