Hi,
I had hoped that my original post didn't have that "OMG you guys suck" tone, but it would seem that I was incorrect.
With someone with 20 years experience you should know that if you are given a project that you know nothing about, have no design documentation, were not in on the planning meetings, and not in touch with the original crew that created this program, then you can't really complain about the state of the code, unless you can bring up specific examples of bad code that these guys created.
This kind of comment makes me really angry. I have 20 years
gaming experience. And, yes, I certainly
can complain about code quality, as much as I like. All the reasons you listed for me to
not complain are excuses reeled-off by lazy bastards who look for reasons
not to actually do any work. I am a Software Engineer, not 'just a programmer'; a 'mess' like the original GPL'd version of WZ is a
challenge, not an obstacle.
Now that I've got that off my chest...
The point I was trying to make, is that there are plenty of little niggles in the original code that, when fixed, would improve gameplay. Now, someone made the point that fixing some of them require fundamental changes... or that 'fixing this will break something else'.
Well, this goes directly to the heart of my original post - if the code is so spaghetti-ish, then, in order to move forward with confidence, the
best course of action is to refactor the code in question. Of course, when you're doing something for fun / part-time, hard-core refactoring can be difficult (this, I know from experience
), but I can
guarantee that it will be worth it, for the reasons I outlined; a game that crashes all the time, will
never be fun.
Yes, I
do know how bad the code is - I looked into doing 64-bit compatibility fixes around the 2.0 - 2.1 change-over time. My professional opinion is that the primary problem is that it is Windows code. Devs who've worked on something other than Windows will understand this.
Knowing how bad the code was is the very reason I made the post in the first place; that many of the bugs in recent versions had their origins in the structure of the original code. I know from experience, that adding to 'bad' code is extremely difficult and becomes more difficult the more you add, or as someone once said "If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture."
To the devs for their not-so-veiled appeals for assistance: I would, genuinely, love to be able to contribute directly to the code base. My excuse (and I'm sticking to it
) is that I spend all day working on code that *ahem* "would certainly benefit from refactoring", so it kinda takes the edge off working on the same in my spare time. *grin*
Right now, I'm only able to offer opinion / guidance on how I feel improvements could be made
Okay, enough rants for one night
Much Lav,
Eddy
