mutator

Pluggable modules for Unreal Tournament that slightly mutate gameplay. Mutators can be a lot of fun because you pick and choose what you like, and most mutators will operate in harmony with the rest.

All kinds of changes are possible. Changing weapons, ammo, gravity, speed, and game rules are just a few of the vast number of possibilities. Why not just use a mod? Mods have to be used exclusive of each other, so you can't pick and choose which rules you want to change. For example, you can't play Infiltration with Dark Magic weapons. You could do it if they were mutators.

Possibly the only failing of mutators is their authors' ambition; many mutators would be better off split up into smaller mutators and maybe parts of them made into a game type. Instead of choosing Infiltration weapons and then picking the weapons I want to deal with, I should be able to choose the weapons by implementing them one at a time as mutators. Then I could choose which weapons I want with no hassle, and I could play them with other mods.

Should maybe be called mutagens?

A mutator is also a type of method used in object-oriented programming languages to change the value of an instance variable.

For example, pretend that I have written a class which acts as a banking management program. In the constructor, I have set up the account balance, interest rate, how frequently interest is compounded, along with other things. These things have a particular value which the user does not assign to the variables... they are simply there as a template.

However, I can invoke the mutator method, which will allow for the user to change the set values of these variables. He could perhaps add more money to his balance.

so if I have this as my mutator:

public void setBalance(double amount)
{
balance = amount;
}

When I prompt the user to input the amount, it will create the balanace.

In order to invoke this method, you would type the name of the class followed by a period and the method name. So if this was part of a class called Accountant and I created an instance of Accountant called myAccount, I would type:

myAccount.setBalance(amount); somewhere in my static method.

Mutator methods are typically void, because they don't return any value, but can return the value of the variable within the method.