Return to “Dev Logs”

Post

Re: Tuesday, January 31, 2017

#91
Ringu wrote:I didn't need to search an entire directory because I knew what the file that contained a function would be called because there were rules governing the names of such things.
Hah, I wish. Alas, I'm stuck with our 30 years in the making hybrid rhapsodial monstrosity :ghost:
(not complaining though, great company and the work is generally fun :D )
Warning: do not ask about physics unless you really want to know about physics.
The LT IRC / Alternate link || The REKT Wiki || PUDDING
Image
Post

Re: Tuesday, January 31, 2017

#92
Dinosawer wrote:
Ringu wrote:I didn't need to search an entire directory because I knew what the file that contained a function would be called because there were rules governing the names of such things.
Hah, I wish. Alas, I'm stuck with our 30 years in the making hybrid rhapsodial monstrosity :ghost:
(not complaining though, great company and the work is generally fun :D )
Ahh man, I feel for you. Don't worry though, not everyone has such a legacy burden!
On Windows in the early 90's we luckily didn't have all that much inherited code, (certainly not in my part, which was the emulation needed for the WoW DOS box), but I've certainly seen systems that weren't so easy to work on!

I think a lot of this stems from the kind of companies and environments that we learned in, as well; I spent my youth as a low-level systems programmer for which text editors were considered a highfalutin' luxury, and I think to large extent that stayed with me.
--
Mind The Gap
Post

Re: Tuesday, January 31, 2017

#94
Ah, you kids today. I've actually used TECO; I'm in a position to confirm that everything Ed Post said about it in "Real Programmers" is gospel truth.

Slightly more recently, I fell in love with the BRIEF text editor. The default was a great balance of clarity (unlike the modal mess of vi/EMACS) and power. And if there was some editing feature you wanted that didn't already exist, the "E" in BRIEF stood for "extensible" -- meaning you could code your own features using BRIEF's internal scripting language. Which wasn't LISP.

I was very productive with BRIEF because, other than optional keyword and bracket/brace highlighting, it had the great virtue that it would get out of my way, with zero fussiness, and let me blast code out of my brain as quickly as possible. That's a huge benefit when one has a short attention span at the best of times, it was the worst of times I need a sandwich was that a bird outside my window I should research its species... sorry, what was I saying?

Actually, that's the one serious point in the middle of my reminiscencing: there is a difference in editing needs between bashing out a torrent of code while an idea is fresh in your mind, and picking carefully through existing code to make sure it's clean and modular and, oh yes, syntactically and semantically correct alongside all the other existing code.

For code-blasting, a text editor (I now use Zeus, a less-capable BRIEF-alike) is optimal because it doesn't keep jogging your elbow. For debugging and integration and maintenance, an IDE might be helpful and a good choice. In other words, I don't see a need to have an editor-of-choice holy war because I think tool use should be guided by the usage context.

Naturally I fully expect the "but I can blast out lots of code in my IDE!" objection. To this, I gently reply that an IDE is the perfect tool for you in all contexts because you are an exceptional specimen of humanity and not representative of the general population of lesser coders. ;)
Post

Re: Tuesday, January 31, 2017

#96
Flatfingers wrote:Naturally I fully expect the "but I can blast out lots of code in my IDE!" objection. To this, I gently reply that an IDE is the perfect tool for you in all contexts because you are an exceptional specimen of humanity and not representative of the general population of lesser coders. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSy5mEcmgwU
Have a question? Send me a PM! || I have a Patreon page up for REKT now! || People talking in IRC over the past two hours: Image
Image
Image
Post

Re: Tuesday, January 31, 2017

#102
Flatfingers wrote:Slightly more recently, I fell in love with the BRIEF text editor.
O
M
G

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time! I used BRIEF extensively at one point (tbh, I can't even remember when that was, now :P) and was seriously smitten with it too. Almost like an Emacs++ for DOS.

I need to go find a clone, now :-D
--
Mind The Gap
Post

Re: Tuesday, January 31, 2017

#104
found wrote:For the next blog it may be interesting to read about the details of the benchmark and the results of LuaJIT. Additionally, why the previous attempts failed to scale. For instance, why isn't the simulation LOD the answer to the problem? I imagine you want to be able to simulation some set of agents at full resolution, but it's costing too much frame time? Are any parts of the simulation multi-threaded? Why not scale back the simulation requirements for 1.0?
While that's obvious and in Josh's plan anyway, simulation LOD has it's pitfalls, too. I had to deal with that at some point.
X3's "Out Of Sector Combat" simulates combat results based on rules on a 30sec ticker.
It was also buggy and badly designed so you sometimes had weak attackers one-shotting battleships or ships with plenty of "Flak" capability overwhelmed by large amounts of small ships where the BB could only "attack" (and annihilate 10000 times over) one small ship per 30 sec.

Eventually I solved that in a mod in the game's own script editor, capturing the combat call and reroutig it from the hardcoded function to my script.
It was a major improvement. A bit slower, of course, because scripted but the simulated combat had maybe 80% the results you might see in 3D combat.

Eventually someone pointed that out to the devs and they asked me to fix it for real. So I got the code for this and the support for some fixes on the data side of things and... OOS combat ended up working 90% like 3D realtime combat. With that degree of reduction that was about as good as you can get.
(I ended up fixing more combat-related balance issues and setting up some new ships but that's a different story)

Just saying that while LOD is a necessity - it's not that easy to get it right. =)
There is no "I" in Tea. That would be gross.

Online Now

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests

cron