Space Farm devlog 8

Hello again!  I've managed to start squeezing in an hour or two here and there this week, which is abnormal for me.  Usually I end up only devoting a few hours of my weekend to Space Farm, if even that, so it's kinda fun to see repro pushes dated "34 hours ago" instead of "2 weeks ago".  Since I've made some little bits of progress here and there, I'll try to keep this update little.

I've finally added a seed maker machine, which has been sitting in my todo list for a pretty long time.  As the name implies, this machine will convert a crop into its corresponding seed.  Code-wise it's relatively simple-- I added a new prefab that copied my sawmill, named it accordingly, checked the necessary checkboxes to mark it a container that can process things, and then dropped in a recipe for turning turnips into turnip seed bags.  At this point I'm not sure if it should continue using manually-created recipes or if I can make it "smart" enough to grab the crop's itemID and convert that into the corresponding seed bag's itemID.  It seems like a nifty change to make, but I might want to have some crops that you can't make seeds for-- that will be a design decision for future Caitlin.

I also took a few minutes to add in support for multiple output items from recipes.  I had been putting this off because it sounded scary, but it ended up being pretty trivial.  Most of the code was already there but hard-coded to use index 0 of the output item list-- I just needed to add a for loop that would cycle through the entire list.  Took like 5 minutes.

On the topic of recipes, adding the turnip seed bag recipe showed me pretty quick that my fancy recipe loading code could only handle one recipe, not multiple.  As I subtly alluded to in devlog 5, I was not super confident about blindly copy/pasting code from a tutorial, so I half-expected to run into this very issue once I added a second recipe.  After a bout of clicking on the same Google results over and over but not understanding what I was reading, I realized the issue-- I was trying to treat the JSON data as an array of recipes, but I didn't actually define its class as an array, but rather one single recipe.

Hopefully the commented out code can help you see what I mean here.  Originally the top class was just "RecipeData" and contained the commented out code.  This meant that when I read the JSON into a RecipeData object, it tried to cram the file into one RecipeData object.  This works fine when there's only one in there, but the editor got really confused when it found more data in the file after that.  To remedy this, I updated the top class to be a RecipeDataList class, and had it contain a list of RecipeData classes.  Now I read the JSON into a RecipeDataList object and it's perfectly happy to do so.  Having a class that has a list full of other classes which also have two lists of additional classes each makes my pea brain hurt, but it seems to work.

After getting all of the above checked in, I realized that my codebase was littered with a lot of junk, such as old commented out code and todos that had long since been completed.  I took some time to hunt through my classes (with the help of Visual Studio's fancy task list window that will look for standard "to do" comments and add them to a list for you!) and tidied up.  It feels a little like busywork at this point, but 15 minutes here and there will probably save me hours of clean-up later on when I can't remember what on earth that todo item was supposed to mean.

Unfortunately I still have a healthy bit of design decision paralysis going on, so I'll probably continue on with the little tasks in my Trello board for now and play some games for "research" in the meantime.