Hi, and welcome to the technical history of ACCAT. Here, I’ll try to explain why things are the way they are. This is obviously going to grow into a very long story.
When I started Animal Crossing: Wild World by in 2005 I soon realised that I wanted to keep track of the items I had acquired. Now there are several ways to do it without doing any (or atleast not a lot of) programming, but I wanted something that was easy to extend, looking good, small, fast etc, etc, etc. I didn’t care how much programming it would involve to get it JUST the way I wanted it.
On top of that, I’m always looking for ways to practice certain aspects I need for my work (I’m a professional programmer) in a fun way. I thought that building ACCAT was a great way to practice my skills and learn new ones at the same time.
So, that’s why I decided to start coding in C++ using the MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes, also sometimes referred to as Microsoft frustrations classes). That’s what we used at work the moment I started, so using that language was an easy choice.
First thing that had to be done was create some kind of data list. Some kind of file that contains all the items. Thankfully, by that time, there were several people who had already placed all the possible items into excel sheets. So, it was pretty easy to come up with a way to translate such a sheet to some data format that ACCAT needed to display the right items. I’ll do a piece on the data format later, but for now it’s enough to say that the format was pretty simple. Once I had that, I almost immediately realised I wanted the items in a treeview. This, because I wanted it also to be possible to show the items by the various series and sets. Besides, again, I didn’t have much experience with treeviews, so that would be more good practice. The buttons on the left side of the main screen where there in a very early state. I guess it’s only logical to have a bunch of buttons determine which catagory items you want to displasy and/or edit. And even though this was a very early version, the number of supported catagories didn’t grow very much. It was clear from the start which catagories should be available.
At the time I started ACCAT, I was also a member of ACC or Animal Crossing Community. Since they had an online catalog, I had a nice long look at it. I must say, I like the way they allow items to be selected or deselected. The current edit mode determines what happens when you tick a box. So I decided to take that system over, even though it’s not a “windows” kind of control. This was something I got a lot of question about in the early days. ”How can I untick an item? ACCAT simply won’t let me. Obviously that had everthing to do with the fact that the edit mode was set to “set” instead of “toggle” by default. Something I fixed in a later state.
To make item management easier I decided to add some viewing filters. Even in the first ACCAT version, the user could show only the items s/he actually have or actually not have. This makes it as easy as possible to sync your ACCAT catalogue with the nook catalogue in game. For the same reason it’s also possible to sort the items in several orders. In Nooks order it’s easy to sync the game catalogue to ACCAT, but in alphabetical order, it’s easiest to find specific items.
I also found it important to be able to search the right item quickly. So that’s why I added a quick search box where the user can simply type in any part of the item name. The itemlist would automaticaly scroll to the right item, so it was easily tickable.
And after this general description, I present to you:
Accat version 00
