Dealing with beginning and ending nodes

[amshahan]

In our parsing of the stagetext, we've been having issues in regards to the beginning and ending nodes of the stagetext.

It seems that the beginning and end nodes essentially have two different versions created. The first kind is the main node that gets read in from its own paragraph, while the second is one that is read in as an option. 

The way we currently have the stagetext files set up is that when we have the ending node as an option, we omit the '.' character from the option name. (i.e. "Ten." node becomes "Ten" option) Well when we are evaluating this end node option, the system ends up creating a new node with that shortened name, thus resulting in an empty node with the option's name instead of the actual ending node.

Would this be a problem with how we are setting up the stagetext files? I would think that the actual nodes need the '!' and '.' characters in order to create matrices with valid watchdogs, and that seems to be the way the graph is created, such as in Lab 6.

So should we simply put "Ten." as the user's option for the ending node instead of "Ten" or are we supposed to find a way around this extra node creation?

Does anybody have any advice regarding this?

[amshahan]

Actually, I think I found a way to make it work. I did change all the ending options in the stagetext to include the "." and simply removed them when displaying the option to the screen.

[cschaozhang]

My understanding is once the stageText is given, the stages and nodes are determined. 

It means the user cannot make any change to the nodes. 

As in the game1, Birth is the start node, and Dead is the end node. 

-Chao