Like last week, I haven’t updated in a while. And like last week, it’s because I’ve been busy. I spent all day Monday and most of Tuesday laying the foundation for the Webware project. Tuesday night was spent doing the fourth Webware homework. Not counting today, we have three more days to finish the Webware project (it’s due at 11:59:59 PM on Saturday). It will probably get done, but it’ll probably be fairly unpolished. In a twist of irony, logout is implemented for the project I’ve spent two days on, but not the project I’ve spent two terms on.
Which brings me to what’s going on with the IQP. I’m determined to get the SOAP refactoring done, maybe along with some other miscellaneous stuff since I probably don’t have time to make any significant headway on project analysis this week. I’ve spent the last two or three hours working on the refactoring. Much to my amazement, my first attempt to compile the Flex app after all those massive changes actually worked!
Of course, the app wasn’t fully operational; I should have the last problem fixed shortly. My solution is a hack, but as far as I can tell, there are no non-hack solutions for the whole “data grid can’t see nested data fields” problem. I’ve seen it done several ways: subclassing the data grid column class so it can see them (but this breaks sorting and some other stuff), using a proxy object to wrap the objects in the grid (similar to what I’m going to do, but would require more work), and overriding the label function (which also breaks sorting and requires overriding that function as well). My plan is much simpler: the objects in the datagrid are CompanyToCompanyPermissionsMapping objects, so I’ll just add getters to that class that get the data out of the nested objects. Like I said, it’s a hack and it should not be used anywhere in the code we write, just for the benefit of the datagrid.
During the refactoring, I noticed a bunch of other things that should probably be refactored as well. If time permits, I’ll do them this week, otherwise they’ll get added to the to-do list like everything else. Next week there should be no other projects to worry about, so I should be able to get project analysis implemented (or at least started).
On a related note, I’ve been trying to stay on top of so many things that I haven’t had an opportunity to play Modern Warfare 2 since the weekend. I got home on Friday around 7PM and parked myself in the media room (which contains a big honking plasma screen and surround sound with a subwoofer that shakes the whole house if someone on screen so much as coughs) until midnight. Not because I got tired at midnight, but because I finished the campaign at midnight. Yep, that’s right: brand new game, no idea how to navigate the levels, but I still finished the entire campaign in just under five hours. The campaign was exciting, except for the ending, which was stupid.
***SPOILER ALERT!***
The game really does a good job of engaging you emotionally. Fighting your way through the streets of Virginia and Washington, D.C., you really get that sense of desperation and hopelessness. It was especially noticeable when you’re in DC and your chopper gets shot down. You’re trapped in the wreckage and you lost your weapons. Your CO tosses you an M4A1; a bullet plows through his skull and kills him as he does so. You shoot at the seemingly endless Russian forces, but your gun clicks empty. Another soldier pulls out a fresh clip and tosses it to you, saying “that’s the very last one!” You go back to shooting at the enemy but 30 rounds isn’t much against dozens of enemy troops… and your gun clicks empty again. The other friendlies who survived the crash are equally screwed; one says “I’m out!” and another says “three bullets left!”
Fade to white. Level over.
Yes, the campaign really gets to you emotionally, so it’s too bad the “surprise” ending is lame and utterly predictable. I knew what was going to happen from the moment the Secretary of Defense said to General Shepherd, in one of the inter-level cut-scenes, “You warned us. We should have listened.” Surprise, surprise, he betrays and kills you (as Gary “Roach” Sanderson). Then, as Soap MacTavish (whom you spent most of CoD4 playing as), you team up with Captain Price and Nikolai to kill Shepherd and show the world the truth. You succeed in the former, but whether you succeed in the latter is up to your imagination, I guess, since there’s no newscaster as there was at the end of CoD4.
The plot in general was not as good as in CoD4, in my opinion. In CoD4, everything was very sequential and logical in occurrence. In MW2, there are a LOT of non sequiturs. You’re infiltrating a Russian base to retrieve an “ACS module”. Okay, why? What does this thing do? That doesn’t get explained until the cut-scene after the mission, when you find out that apparently the whole US military relies on it. This is how the Russians manage to invade the US, for those who were scratching their heads trying to figure out how that happened.
There are a lot of questions left unanswered altogether too. It turns out that the prisoner that Makarov hates so much but for some reason can’t kill is Price. How did he end up in a Russian gulag? Why couldn’t Makarov kill him? The Russians invaded the US using the magical ACS module to keep us from seeing them, apparently. Still, how is it that absolutely nobody noticed this massive flying invasion force? Are there no surveillance satellites to see them? No civilian aircraft to ask air traffic control, “what the hell is that flying armada with Russian markings doing here?” And when a bunch of stations DO report picking up bogeys, nobody gets suspicious and scrambles a few fighters to investigate? Or are we supposed to believe that Shepherd somehow managed to block all of that?
What bothers me the most is Shepherd’s reason for his betrayal. “Five years ago, I lost 30,000 men in the blink of an eye, and the whole world just fucking sat there and watched. But tomorrow… tomorrow there will be no shortage of volunteers, no shortage of patriots.” So you thought our military was weak and decided to fix that by orchestrating a devastating attack on your own country?!? WTF?!? What about the civilian casualties this caused? Are they just acceptable collateral damage? What about the impact of the governmental disarray that results or the damage inflicted on the US economy? It’s unfathomable to think that someone ascended to the highest ranks of the military, having sworn to protect our nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and then decides to do our enemies’ job for them.
Maybe some of this will be clearer when I replay through the campaign a second time. Or maybe Infinity Ward needs to come up with something more plausible next time.
