The Orange DayA Technical Jungle

Recently I’ve been working on an Event System in C++. You might be reading that right now and wonder why that small sentence makes it sound like a true endeavor. Well, it was. As many of you may know I’m a student at Champlain College, and in one of my classes, each of the students are tasked to use an event system or a messaging system in their game. The teacher provided us with one, and it’s really great and all, but I couldn’t help but feeling restricted, especially after having used C# for so long where the code is so forgiving, and easy.

I did some research and it turns out that a lot of event systems in C++ are organized in such a way that when you want to do events you must:

• Create an EventManager class (nothing wrong with this)
• Create an EventListener class (for setting up events)
• Create and Event base class

• Be restricted to use only one function to handle your events
• Create a huge enum holding a key for each of your events (Can hash it for speed)

I saw those and my heart dropped. I immediately thought that is way to restrictive, there must be an easier way to get events to work. And so the researching began.

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So, you wanna convert a uint to hex in AS3, huh? Well, this is how you do it:

function uintToHex(val:uint):String {
	var pref:String = "000000";
	var str:String = String(pref + val.toString(16));
	return "#" + str.substr(-6).toUpperCase();
}

What I think this is really useful for is converting randomly generated colors to hexadecimals so that you can access them later. I mean, it’s not that the uint equivalents are bad or anything, but the hex codes are generally easier to work with.

Also, awhile back I was browsing the web seeing how other people managed to do this, and I found this post: Tylerbeck.com
Feel free to check it out. It’s really great for understanding hexadecimals a bit more. It’s a longer function, but does the exact same thing as this one.

Good Luck,
Thomas