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Issue 2.6

FEATURE

Art and Letters

Drawing Hexes (and Other Things) with Text

Issue: 2.6 (July/August 2004)
Author: Lars Jensen
Author Bio: Lars Jensen is so old-school he edits programs by taping the little paper rectangles back into punch cards.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 17,394
Starting Page Number: 24
Article Number: 2611
Resource File(s):

Download Icon 2611.zip Updated: 2013-03-11 19:07:58

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

In all but the simplest projects, it's usually a good idea to develop the user interface separately from the "engine" -- that is, the program's internal operations. If this separation is complete, debugging and testing the engine can be simpler and more exhaustive. You can even create different user interfaces for different kinds of environments, from desktop applications to cell phones to Internet services.

However, you need a way to know what's happening inside your engine. I usually just dump my engine status as ASCII text to a log file or a window as needed. Text is workable, but often cumbersome -- without careful formatting, the very patterns of behavior I'd like to reveal might be hidden by the sheer bulk of it all.

This became particularly irksome for me in a hexagonal board game engine; trying to visualize the action from lists of hex coordinates was just too mind-boggling. I needed a way to "draw" the board in two dimensions using text characters instead of pixels. In this article, I'll review the design and implementation of a class and subclass that made this easy.

The Essential API

I like to start a new class by first thinking about its API ("application programming interface" -- the set of methods and properties that it presents to the world), and leaving the implementation for a bit later. To design an API, you need to know what you want to get out of it, so I used a text editor to mock up my desired output:

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