Bank Interface and Module

This page is a discussion of the Bank Office Sub-Module.

The Bank Office Sub-Module is designed to handle the Bank office interface; more specifically, it's designed to display a list of the player's transactions throughout the course of the entire game. There are no internal pieces of information handled by this module; all data is handled by other modules within the game, and thus this module deals only with the methods required to carry out the necessary functions. This module is required by the Starport module only. The Bank sub-module is a peripheral portion of the game, but it is still important as it allows the player to track the flow of their money (it was also a feature of the original games). All code for the Bank Office Sub-Module is located in the sf3_starport_bank.py file.

Summary Description
The player will be allowed access to the Bank if and only if a certain flag is set to True during the initialization of a given Starport object. If this is the case and the player enters the appropriate office at that Starport, the game routine will pull the information out of the player's transactions list, organize it into the appropriate columns in the interface, and display it on screen. The information is displayed on screen until the player prompts the game to move on, at which point the game will go back to the Starport's concourse.

Interface
The Bank Interface is probably the simplest of the game's many interfaces. The interface itself consists of one area, a Message Box (though that area is divided into three separate columns, one to display transaction dates, one for transaction details, and one for transaction amounts. The player may use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through all of the transactions they've undertaken during the course of an entire game; up and down scroll buttons for the mouse will also be provided to the player (on the right-hand side of the transaction amount column. Finally, if the player is using a mouse with a scroll wheel, they will be able to use the wheel to scroll up and down. Any scrolling action will be accompanied by the sounding of the SELECT_SCROLL tone. An area at the bottom of the screen lists the player's current balance and the message "PRESS SPACEBAR TO EXIT". As this message says, pressing the &lt;Space Bar&gt; will cause the Interface to exit out. Clicking on this message will also cause the Interface to exit out. When the Interface exists out, the ACKNOWLEDGED tone will sound and game control will pass back to the Starport Concourse Interface. As with all Starport modules, no calls will be made to the gameClock object to advance the time while the Interface is active.

displayTransactions
This method is called whenever the Bank Interface becomes active.s

Crap - what happened to the rest of the damn module?

Module Status
This is current as of December 22, 2010.

This module is currently in the final design phases; while specific descriptions of the intended functions of modules have yet to be written, the remainder of the module's basic description is complete at this point. There's really not much at all to this module; the interface coding will probably be the most complex portion of it. Otherwise, this one really has written itself. I'm a little concerned that I've oversimplified things and that the methods are interacting specifically with other objects; it may mean that I need to put these methods in with those objects rather than in a separate module. If that's the case, then I've basically wasted a wiki page...

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