Monday, May 6, 2019

Automating Architect of Worlds Update

I feel like I haven't made much progress on my automation of Architect of Worlds project. Step Eleven has proven far more troublesome than originally anticipated, largely owing to the fact that I didn't save enough information from Step Ten - specifically how far inward the dominant gas giant migrates. I had just stored the final position for later use. Oops.

Once this was rectified, I ended up reevaluating my approach to Step Eleven to put it more in line with what Jon wrote in the first place. See, originally, I was generating all of the orbits, stocking all of the orbits, and then deciding which orbits to delete, but I realized this was just taking extra time and wasting memory. So now the Step Eleven function will run through Step Eleven then decide whether or not to place another planet, and continue from there.

There is also the matter of how I will store all of the planets' data. I am still not 100% sure about how to set up the data structure for this project in the most efficient way possible. As it stands, I have a bunch of separate objects, but I'm starting to wonder if these should go in lists in a variable in the parent or not. So, frex, System has a variable called Stars that contains a list of Star objects, and each Star object has a variable called Planets that contains a list of planet objects, and so on.

I'm not sure I like this and haven't committed to it, yet. But it looks like I will need to pass a list of planets out of Step Eleven, and future steps will process this list, one planet-object at a time. I am really hoping someone leaves some suggestions in the comments, below, because this is definitely pushing my understanding of data handling.

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