My second game is another little tech demo which asks your age and returns its equivalent on every planet. Yes, another ground breaking show of technology!
I quite enjoyed make the interplanetary age calculator. This was mainly due to the challenges I encountered whilst coding.
Feature Creep
| Planet | Rotation Period (Earth days) | Revolution Period (Earth years/days) |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury |
58.6 days
|
87.97 days
|
| Venus |
243 days
|
224.7
|
| Earth |
1 day
|
365.25 days
|
| Mars |
1.03 days
|
1.88 years
|
| Jupiter |
0.41 days
|
11.86 years
|
| Saturn |
0.45 days
|
29.46 years
|
| Uranus |
0.72 days
|
84.01 years
|
| Neptune |
0.67 days
|
164.79 years
|
| Pluto |
6.38 days
|
248.59 years
|
The Int to Str, Str to Int Switcheroo
The next problem encountered was that the print statement wouldn't work because the print command doesn't work with integers. Having researched the need to change the user's input to an integer, it was relatively quick to realise what needed to be done. The result was the following flow of code:
print("What is your age?")age = int(input(">>> "))
mars_age_years = age / 1.88
print("You are " + str(mercury_age_years) + "Mercury years old")
This bit of code would essentially calculate and print a user's age on Mars
Round, Float, Decimal - Who knows!?
If the code above is run the result is that you age is likely to be have a lot of numbers after the decimal point (eg. 5.319148936170213 if you input an age of 10). This doesn't scan as easily as having an age to two decimal points. This is where the majority of my research came in.
I recall in java it is easy to restrict to a number of decimal points by wrapping your equation/result in float. In python there are three options, all with different foibles of their own. I won't go into them here as I don't entirely understand what the difference is at this point in my learning.
After a decent bit of research, I found that rounding the age to two decimal points produced the answer I wanted. So this:
mars_age_years = age / 1.88mars_age_years = round(age / 1.88 ,2)Github Learnings
Part of the fun of this project is putting the code out there for all to see. Like many people I use Github. I have the windows client installed, and it is very easy to push everything to the cloud for all to see. I am researching whether there is an online python interpreter so the scripts can be run without the need to have python on the machine.
I had just finished the game and was attempting to put the final version up on Github when I inadvertently rolled back on my machine. Being new to it all, I attempted to revert to the version online, but because there was now a disconnect between local and git, I was getting an error. It took me two and a half hours to sort out what would have taken someone with the knowledge five minutes to do! I really need to be a little more careful with how I roll back in future.
Game #002 Conclusion
If you have taken a look at the script in full, you will note that everything is still very procedural. There are no functions defined, for example. This is ripe for a revisit further down the line to refactor just about every line of code to make it easier to read and maintain.
Another thing that needs to change is that the user input is incredibly brittle, and not very interesting. If you put 0 in, the programme crashes. If you put a decimal in, the programme will crash. A loop needs to be added to handle these two things.
And what about interplanetary days?! The site I found during my initial design and research calculates the user's age in days as well. This is particularly interesting as each planet's rotation period is vastly different. So, this would definitely be a good addition to the whole programme.
Watch this space.
