resurrecting zombies, part deux

posts/2016-09-10-resurrecting-zombies-part-2.md

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+---
+title: Resurrecting Zombies, Part 2
+tags: coding, haxe, games, zombie protagonist
+description: Going through a bunch of compiler errors to get the old code at least a bit closer to working.
+---
+
+### `Actor should be Void`
+
+Fourteen things "should be Void". That's lots of things. It's also,
+coincidentally, the count of constructor methods that end in `return
+this;`:
+
+~~~ {.bash}
+$ grep -c "return this;" *.hx
+Actor.hx:2
+KeyboardMonitor.hx:0
+Screens.hx:12
+ZombieProtagonist.hx:0
+~~~
+
+Amazingly, the locations (e.g. "`./Actor.hx:47: characters 8-19`") all
+map, too. Shocking. Can getting this to compile be as simple as
+removing those return statements? Maybe not, but it gets us further:
+
+~~~ {.bash}
+$ haxe -cp . -main ZombieProtagonist -swf Zombie.swf
+./Actor.hx:322: lines 322-328 : Field touchedHaven should be declared with 'override' since it is inherited from superclass FollowFlee
+... (a few of these)
+~~~
+
+### Overriding
+
+According to [modern haxe
+practices](http://haxe.org/manual/class-field-overriding.html), if
+you're overriding a parent method, you have to explicitly define the
+method with the `override` keyword.
+
+Part of me hoped it would be this simple. The only compiler errors
+reported at the start were of these two varieties. There were a bunch,
+but just thosw two categories. Unfortunately, that was apparently just
+a first parsing pass.
+
+~~~ {.bash}
+$ haxe -cp . -main ZombieProtagonist -swf Zombie.swf
+./Actor.hx:270: characters 19-25 : Local variable startx used without being initialized
+~~~
+
+Two interesting things here: 1- apparently variable declaration rules
+have changed, and 2- only one error was spit out. That latter thing is
+ominous, and suggests to me that I'm about to dive into a very long
+back and forth between compiler and editor[^ide].
+
+### Bug Hunt
+
+Well, that turned out not to be as bad as feared. Turn a couple of:
+
+~~~ {.haxe}
+        var startx;
+        var starty;
+~~~
+
+... into ...
+
+~~~ {.haxe}
+        var startx = 0;
+        var starty = 0;
+~~~
+
+... which got rid of that error entirely. Then came:
+
+~~~ {.haxe}
+./Screens.hx:44: characters 8-14 : You cannot assign some super class vars before calling super() in flash, this will reset them to default value
+~~~
+
+That meant crawling through all the places I was calling `super()` and
+moving them to before any attribute assignments. That was confined
+solely to constructor methods.
+
+Once that was done? It compiled!
+
+... and the SWF was a whitescreen.
+
+Alright, then. Back to the drawing board. Now that it compiles, I
+supposed I'll have to actually figure out how it works, in order to,
+you know, make it work.
+
+
+[^ide]: At this point, I'm tempted to start using a haxe IDE to help
+me along. I'm pretty solidly in the emacs camp, though, so it's going
+to take a little more, yet.