How I Practiced “Highland Links” Today
Woke up early today, coffee in hand, staring at that damn “Highland Links” project folder on my desktop. Felt like tackling it head-on this time, no more putting it off. Opened the editor, scrolled through old files – total mess, no structure, like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
First thing, grabbed the main routing setup. Knew I needed better organization, so I started smashing all those loose routes into proper controllers. Created a new directory called “Journey,” felt fitting for this trek. Made separate files for “PathFinding,” “TerrainMapping,” and “ObstacleTracking.” Copy-pasted the spaghetti code into their new homes, deleted the old tangled mess. Hit save, ran the test suite – half of them crashed. Oops.
Took a deep breath. Went into the “PathFinding” controller. Realized I was handling elevation changes like an idiot – calculating every single step manually. Found that terrain elevation API buried in the project notes. Slapped that into a helper function, called it “ElevationAssist.” Just plugged coordinates in, boom, got the height data back. Rewrote the path calculations to lean on ElevationAssist. Ran the tests again. Fewer crashes. Progress. Felt good.
Next up, the obstacle data. Had markers scattered everywhere – rocks, streams, boggy patches. Needed them clustered by region, not just dumped in a giant list. Dug up that spatial indexing library I bookmarked ages ago. Forced it into the “TerrainMapping” controller. Took some trial and error:
- First pass grouped things, but super slow.
- Forgot to set bounding boxes properly. Swore at the screen.
- Fixed the boundaries, tweaked the clustering range.
- Finally saw them snap into logical groups on the test render.
Lunch break. Sandwich tasted like victory. Came back, stared down the last beast: obstacle interaction logic. Felt clunky. Player reactions weren’t smooth. Found the player state machine code – another tangled mess. Untangled the “EncounterObstacle” branch. Made “Rock,” “Stream,” and “Bog” into their own dedicated state handlers. Replaced the confusing nested switches with clear function calls: handleRock(), handleStream(). Tested player movement near a stream. Instead of jittering, they smoothly navigated around it. High-fived myself (quietly, no witnesses).
Late afternoon now. Glued everything together. Routes pointing to the new controllers. Data flowing from helpers. Ran the full simulation. Held my breath.
The player avatar actually crossed the virtual highlands. Detoured around rocks. Splashed realistically through streams. Got slightly slowed in the bog (just like I wanted). No catastrophic fails. No stack traces.
Feeling accomplished. Lesson learned? Breaking big messes into small, named boxes saves sanity. Tools buried in notes? Use ’em. Took all day, but the view from the virtual summit? Worth it.