Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I sold my soul to Patch 2.4
One of the things that has prevented me from wasting a lot of time on World of Warcraft since I hit level 70 has been the dearth of things to do if you don’t do instances.
Unfortunately, last Tuesday saw the release of Patch 2.4, which rebalanced the battlegrounds and added a whole bunch of daily-repeatable solo quests.
So this weekend saw me get absolutely nothing done on Wizard. Again. I did make over a thousand gold questing and finally won my first Warsong Gulch, though. I’m sure that makes you happy!
But in the end, let’s face facts. The reason that I haven’t been working on Wizard is because I don’ wanna. It was originally written as nasty, one-off code and I’ll have to spend a day just cleaning it up before I can add any new features like enemies. (Lesson learned: Don’t write nasty one-off code under any circumstances.)
So I think I’m going to move on to my second game. I have already decided what it’s going to be, but I’m not gonna tell you yet 🙂
“Don’t write nasty one-off code under any circumstances”
Here’s one of my favourite coding axioms: “The problem with quick and dirty code is that the dirty remains long after the quick is forgotten”.
A secret game?!? But now you’ve got me in suspense!
WoW, eh? Could never find myself addicted to it as a lot of people.. but seriously, what’s the new game?
What does “one off code” mean? I know what a “one-off” problem is (usually having to do with not taking 0 into account) but one off code is different?
Keith
And I quote from my LD survival guide..
4.3 Write for clarity, not speed
Modern computers are so fast that you shouldn’t need to optimize your ludum dare entry at all. Do not attempt any kind of optimization while you’re writing the code, as you’ll only end up with:
a) messy code
b) obscure bugs
Optimizing for readability is much better, as it will save you time when hunting the eventual bugs. Comment things when you do something unobvious. It’s easy to forget things even within two days.
Keith, “one off” in this case means “I’m just going to write it as quickly as I can without worrying about reusing it later”. Sort of like saying “one of a kind”, but in terms of how often you can use this code. If you plan to reuse, you’re better off throwing it away or making serious modifications.
sol_hsa’s quote is actually just good computer science. I have yet to find a quote from someone like Steve Maguire or Donald Knuth or Scott Meyers who says “Go ahead and write efficient code that compromises readability”. Well, they do say it, but usually with the caveat “If writing readable code is really a performance issue, which it rarely is, and you should definitely run tests to verify that it is the case before assuming where the bottlenecks in your application’s performance is.” B-)
“sol_hsa’s quote is actually just good computer science. ”
Most of the rules in my “survival guide” aim at how to maximize the time you have.
When all you have is the 48 hours, there’s this strange pressure to “write final code” on one go, instead of doing an optimization pass later on.. but the fact is, today’s PCs are so fast that you probably won’t need that optimization pass at all.
That said, the time I wasted working on fixed point math in orbital sniper has made it possible for me to port OS on some handheld platforms with fairly little extra work. =)