The code
2018-09-26
The last few days I spent cleaning up the Mission Generator's code, and documenting it thoroughly. One could argue that no-one will look at the code of an X-Plane plugin, anyway, so why document it?
But I plan that the initial release of the Mission Generator will only the first step in a long development. Which means that I will work with this code for a long time. Spending some effort now to help future me, who will have forgotten half the intricacies of the Mission Generator, is time well spent.
But beyond that, I hope that other people will look at the code, and try to improve things. While the Mission Generator is a commercial piece of software, I give every user express permission to publish improved versions of a few key files. This might, for example, include more varied bonus missions, or more mission templates, or re-balanced versions of the level ups.
I also hope that the Mission Generator will encourage people to develop their own plugins. As it turns out, writing plugins for X-Plane is not hard (if you know programming). There are a lot of intricate and interesting algorithms in the Mission Generator, and all of them are now well-documented for intrepid readers.
And of course, old habits die hard. I always try to maintain as good a code quality as I can in my programming projects.