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How to Program Class Selection

A project log for Open Tag

The best game of laser tag you've never played. Choose your class - from a sniper to a pyro, and customize your own game of laser tag!

opentagopentag 03/01/2021 at 05:300 Comments

This entry is going to be a little coding specific, but I think it may be helpful to someone to understand how I went about adding features to the code, in case people want to do something similar in the future. You can follow a similar process.

The first thing that I needed to do was figure out what I wanted the code to do. I wanted to allow a player to change their class for a short period of time after they are revived. They shouldn't be able to change classes in the middle of the game, because every time you change class, your health is reset. It would be pretty unfair to get hit a few times, then change classes to get full health in the middle of the game. 

After you are revived (or when you power up the device), you should have a short amount of time, say, 5 seconds, where you can change your class (1). During this time, players can press the "change class button" to change classes (2). You need to know what your class is every time you change it, so the OLED should display your class every time you change it (3). At the end of that time, the OLED should switch to showing your current health (4). When that happens, your class is set, and you can't change it anymore. Understanding and writing this out was the most important part of changing the code. Without an understanding of how I want the code to work, it would be nearly impossible to make the change and make everything work. 

So, knowing what I want the code to do, I now have to make changes to the code.

  1. To keep track of when you can change your classes, I created a new variable. When you are revived (or start the game, which uses the same function), that function sets this variable to 5 seconds in the future. As long as the current time hasn't passed this stored time, you can change classes. Show your current class and team on the OLED (using an OLED controlling function, which I'd already written)
  2. I added a button (active low), and used some logic I use for other buttons to only change classes once when the button is pressed. (I check if the button's state changed from not pressed to pressed. If so, change class to another valid class).
  3. When the class changes, update the OLED. 
  4. Once I've passed the time where I can no longer change classes, change the OLED to show current health 

After going of that, I went into the code and added a function that did those things. I had to change some of the original code, as the function that I had that changed classes had other stuff bundled in it. So I pulled those things out so that I could call on them in this new function. I know this is a little hand-wavy about how I actually implemented the change, but I don't think going over the line by line changes is as helpful as going over the high level thinking that went into the change. If you really want to know how I did that, I'd be happy to send you the two versions for you to do a code comparison. The diagram of the functional blocks of code is shown below.

Respawn code Flow Diagram

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