211–220 of 363 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
15000 LOC in bash. You sick bastard.
I am only guilty for the first 100 LOC, the rest is not my fault :)
No, not a BBS door, but an actual door, written in Second Life's LSL (Linden Scripting Language). You'd think making a door should be pretty simple, but as the engine had no 3D primitive (prim) that had an axis on one of its edges, doors were often pretty awkward workarounds, either involving linking the door to a cylinder or worse, rotating and then moving when the door was opened or closed.
This script when dropped into a basic cube prim shapes it into a door, applies a texture and most importantly, cuts the prim in half so that the Z-axis ends up on the side and it can rotate around and act like a door in only one prim (the prim allowance was limited, so this mattered).
The script also has several workarounds for engine funkyness, including one where it automatically moves back into position after every cycle to counteract "drift" - otherwise, due to accumulated floating point error, the doors would slowly drift out of position when opened and closed many times.
I know it is still in use, because Second Life still forwards messages to my account to email, so occasionally I get gems such as this:
> [16:04] distresseddamsel: hi there, i just purchased your wooden slave kennels and i can't get into it. I tried to follow your istructions on how to change the group, but when i edit the door, the option for group is greyed out.
Apparently my doors have been used in all sorts of items...
Had another call from someone last year saying "x is broke" and... piecing stuff together, I realized they were still using something built in 2002, and using it 13 years later (now 14 years). Trawling through old code was weird - a mix of pride - much of it was pretty readable and understandable - and regret - many 'cut corners' I wish'd I'd not cut now, as it made the fixes take longer.
That said, I think there's something very useful about having to deal with your own code 5-10 years after the fact. You'll have a greater appreciation for why 'the right way' is what it is, and ime, I've found that code tends to be more maintainable and understandable by others when it's been written by someone who's had to maintain old code themselves (usually their own).
Doesn't mean newer/younger folks can't write good maintainable code, but it's a skill that seems to come with age more than anything else.
A system information app I originally wrote for Windows 98, but subsequently added support for NT-class Windows client, still runs and works almost perfectly today (with graceful feature degredation) on Windows 10. I do a tiny amount of work for every new Windows that's released, to support it. Sometimes no work at all. The codebase was originally written in 1998. Nobody uses it now apart from me, but I still maintai…
People still play the Warcraft III map I made in 2006, mostly in Russia. It relied heavily on an extension of the scripting language called vJass created by a genius eastern european hacker named Vexorian and was one of the most advanced of its type for a while. It was also ported to the DotA 2 engine, where it has millions (!) of subscribers.
I've noticed he's often high up in the leaderboards in Google Code Jam.
People still play the Warcraft III map I made in 2006, mostly in Russia. It relied heavily on an extension of the scripting language called vJass created by a genius eastern european hacker named Vexorian and was one of the most advanced of its type for a while. It was also ported to the DotA 2 engine, where it has millions (!) of subscribers.
Oddly, one of the maps ended up being used by some guys for a academic paper they wrote on latency in multiplayer games:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d72f/e6af66a73af303c75fd92f...
I also did some gfx stuff for Quake2 & 3 , but got a cease and desist letter from iD Software, so had to take them down - didn't stop it all ending up in many mods and pak files out there anyway.
Finally, I wrote a MUD Server for Windows, complete with a GUI based world building toolset, which got placed onto a CD-ROM, without my consent, that shipped with a 'How to write multiplayer games' type reference book (and had a section of the book dedicated to it) - I never did manage to get any recompense for that...
Now if only I'd bothered to finish coding and release all those great ideas I've had over the past 25 years...
Several VB6 based tools from 1999 are still in use. They still work just fine in Win 7 64-bit. (VB6 was the best RAD tool from Microsoft, great integration with Windows and was part of the "information at your fingertip" vision. Then Java happend and Microsoft frantically tried to create something similar. 15 lost years, nowadays compiled languages and on the otherside dynamic languages like Javascript succeeded. And…
On the upside, if you want a VB6 app to run on Windows now, all you need is MSVBVM60.DLL* in the same folder and it will run, unlike the massive clutch of files that .NET needs...
(*This holds true for 16bit VB5 and VB4 as well, on 32 bit systems)
The smaller the userbase, the more likely the code is to remain in service forever. The oldest code I've written is http://www3.amherst.edu/~scrutiny/about.php , which has gotten a facelift since I wrote it in 2004, but otherwise seems to have the same functionality and code backing it. Pretty much everything professional is gone...hell, the only employer of mine that is still in business is Google. When I left them…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am only guilty for the first 100 LOC, the rest is not my fault :)
We had a guy who wrote the other 14900 loc in a similar situation and made the whole thing really crappy. He used to say we cannot blame him because he inherited the crappy 100 loc in the first place.
I am the original author of LatexMk[1], a Perl script that runs Latex the correct number of times to ensure all cross-references and such were resolved. It can also run continuously with a previewer and several other goodies. I wrote it around 1993 to scratch my own itch, adapting it from a little script called “Go” by David J. Musliner. At the time I was using a literate programming tool that generated Latex from C…