“Periodically, individual dwarves are struck with an idea for a legendary artifact and enter a strange mood. Dwarves which enter a strange mood will stop whatever they are doing and pursue the construction of this artifact to the exclusion of all else. They will not stop to eat, drink, sleep, or even run away from dangerous creatures. If they do not manage to begin construction of the artifact within a handful of months, they will go insane and die soon afterward.” – Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Strange moods abound in the office. It must be Autumn.
The programmer screams “I must have steps!”
I was seized with the strange mood recently after I got annoyed when implementing a new feature – more office code, I believe. Writing and testing my code required me to make a change to the Lua scripts, open the game, build an office, test the feature, see my stupid mistake, shut down the game, change the Lua script, open the game again, and continue ad infinitum. Uggh. Inspired by Casey Muratori’s Handmade Hero approach to hotloading – even though our approaches are totally, conceptually dissimilar – I decided to add the ability to reload Lua scripts on the fly to the game. The UI code is crude and nasty, but it looks something like this:
