Hey everyone,
Quick post today and exploring what goes into building a feature for CrimeBloc, some seem to think it’s an overnight job, so I want to explore what actually goes into creating something new.
Creating the code for a new feature isn’t necessarily “hard”, for a basic feature you’re looking at a few days, however for a feature like new operations it takes several weeks, sometimes even longer depending on complexity. As most of you know the base is quite old, there is some code in here from when CB first began, fixing features it’s debatably harder than creating something new, as an example I’m going to use the tutorial as an example.
The tutorial code has been in here for quite a long time from what I can see, but the steps are stored in the database, we have no backup that contains these steps, so first off I have to figure out how the tutorial starts, apparently there was a dedicated page for it, but that is long gone, next I need to figure out the logic for how steps advance and how each page handles the tutorial step. This along with reconstructing an actualy working table in the database. So there is a little bit of reverse engineering going on here. So now I’ve figured out how the steps work, we have the table in the database, and we have a bunch of old code that basically calls these steps with very few pointers on what each step is, for example see below as to what the robbery tutorial code is like.
You may notice that there are many mentions of addTutorialHtml() with some numbers. So each of those corrolate to an entry into the database, the 5 signifies tutorial 5, and the second number after the comma is the step. Robbery contains 17 steps explaining different things about the page. And we need to fill in the content for each one and make sure it works, that the buttons work and the text is accurate etc.
Luckily we have someone that has volunteered to help out with the content which most definitly is helping move things along.
In Autotheft, you are guarenteed an Audi during the tutorial, so we need to check that code works on autotheft, and in some cases the code that handles that specific step is gone, so we also need to write that again.
Now we’ve gone through a tiny bit of Robbery, we now have to do this for another 16 seperate features. So as you can see, rebuilding an existing feature - Stock Market, Tutorial, Russian Roulette, Special Robbery is quite time consuming and can be difficult.
OK so now we have the feature ready and done, next step if it gains money or xp we need to balance it so it’s not super OP or redundant. Which in itself takes time, mainly thinking and discussion rather than code on this step. Then we release, and tweak it as needed.
I hope this gives you a little insight into rebuilding and the creation of new features. They certainly don’t happen overnight as much as I would want them to.
Take care, happy gaming
