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hpr2262 :: Abstracting Nurse Jesus

how I abstracted random number generation for more syntactic sugar

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Hosted by Eric Duhamel on 2017-04-04 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
video games, programming, object-oriented, game development, abstraction. (Be the first).
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2262

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Duration: 00:05:24

general.

NOTE: the audio recording appears to have periodic jitter. As I recorded at 44.1 Khz this time, I wonder if my S2 just handles recording at a lower quality better, and if so I'll prefer lower quality over jitter in the recording.

In this episode I explain why and how I abstracted random number and choice generation into self-sustainable methods for objects.

  • A superclass was needed so that all the classes of object in the game engine would have access to these random generation methods.
  • I preferred to use methods in this case so objects would be self-sufficient and wouldn't depend on extra modules imported at the top of my code.
  • The syntactic sugar achieved by using customized methods instead of i.e. random.randint(0, 99) makes the code easier to write and understand at a glance.
  • Nurse Jesus is a pun on the acronym RNG for Random Number Generator
  • Let me know if you get the reference at 2:00 ;-)

I recorded this episode in parts using a program called Urecord on my pocket computer (mobile phone).

I program using Pygame, post on a GNU Social account, and maintain a personal website at NoxBanners.NET. I study programming techniques at Refactoring.com, style at Python.org, and sometimes patterns at Portland Pattern Repository


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