Geeking out today – game rules, flowcharts, coding, Joss Whedon TV shows in the background (“You haven’t seen my drawer of inappropriate starches???”) – the whole nine yards.

I figured that the easiest way to deal with working out the compilation patch for this composition was to approach it like a game, setting up rules and exceptions and outlining the order that things will happen in. So I spent about an hour roughing out what I wanted to happen [PDF, 17Kb], and then set up a flowchart so I could think my way through the code more easily.

 

 

With this in place, I started in on the coding again. It’s slow because I’m trying to keep the process as clean as possible, but was going well until I hit a logic problem. In a normal coding language I’d be fine, but Max has me a little foxed. It should be simple: I have two flags (indicating yes/no for audio and yes/no for video). If the flags are yes, then I need to set values in a list, if the flags are no, then the list for that item should be empty. Once both are settled as yes or no and the lists filled, then the lists need to be concatenated – even if one or both of the lists contain nothing. Easier said than done. If-statements won’t pass lists and so far I haven’t found the mechanism that will do what I need it to.

Heigh ho – it’s a start though, and I feel a lot clearer about what I’m trying to do here. Hopefully a good night’s sleep will sort the problem out!

Update: OK, so I couldn’t leave it alone. But on the plus side – I sorted it! So now I have essentially the whole of the first segment of the flow chart finished. Yay!