61–70 of 155 posts
I recently found myself trying to describe modern software techniques to a layman, who is a carpenter. "Its like this - you're hired to build a house. First, you have to go get someone motivated to harvest the raw materials for you - designs, logic, etc. - which will then be turned into the 'raw wood' that holds up the walls and keeps the roof on. Then, when that person is busy getting the materials cut, you start bu…
I run a small MMORPG and I'm considering open-sourcing the whole thing but the code is a complete mess. The source code of VVVVVV is a work of art in comparison. What holds me back are 1. I'm ashamed to reveal the monstrosity 2. I'm afraid the code is too messy for anyone to be able to make contributions 3. it will make it much easier for hackers to find exploits. It's a shame because I think the game would be really…
Messy code that produces a valuable product is better than beautiful code that does nothing.
I run a small MMORPG and I'm considering open-sourcing the whole thing but the code is a complete mess. The source code of VVVVVV is a work of art in comparison. What holds me back are 1. I'm ashamed to reveal the monstrosity 2. I'm afraid the code is too messy for anyone to be able to make contributions 3. it will make it much easier for hackers to find exploits. It's a shame because I think the game would be really…
Messy code that produces a valuable product is better than beautiful code that does nothing.
To be fair,everybody in web development knows the same thing is true for the internet.
I run a small MMORPG and I'm considering open-sourcing the whole thing but the code is a complete mess. The source code of VVVVVV is a work of art in comparison. What holds me back are 1. I'm ashamed to reveal the monstrosity 2. I'm afraid the code is too messy for anyone to be able to make contributions 3. it will make it much easier for hackers to find exploits. It's a shame because I think the game would be really…
I run a small MMORPG and I'm considering open-sourcing the whole thing but the code is a complete mess. The source code of VVVVVV is a work of art in comparison. What holds me back are 1. I'm ashamed to reveal the monstrosity 2. I'm afraid the code is too messy for anyone to be able to make contributions 3. it will make it much easier for hackers to find exploits. It's a shame because I think the game would be really…
When comes time to shipping a game, the crunches, pressure and overall stress is through the roof. Most everything goes at that point: duct tape, hot glue, bobby pins and toad spit. And if you disagree with management over these 'not so best practices' (in order to ship faster...) they will find someone to do it and you could be out of a job.
That being said I would not trade my time in that industry for anything else. It's basically the BUDs of programming (of course I'm biased)
Good times!
The profit margins on ad-sponsored web-based multiplayer games are paper thin. They don't care about code structure or cleanliness at all. If someone can make fugly code that performs 10% better, that can make the difference between a profit or a loss or it can mean doubling profits/earnings from the game.
This is very different from most software businesses where even a solution that performs 10x worse is still acceptable if it makes for cleaner code that is easier to maintain and can handle changing requirements better.
Micro-optimizations and clean code are mutually exclusive IMO. Like for example, people may be tempted to send JSON objects with nice descriptive properties like 'direction', 'keyCode', etc... But in the end it's faster to just send a raw string or binary packet without any property names; just pass raw integers directly in a certain order and the receiver decodes the message assuming a certain order. This is extremely inflexible at the protocol level but it performs really well (I.e. you can't easily add new properties later or make some of them optional without breaking the current protocol).
I run a small MMORPG and I'm considering open-sourcing the whole thing but the code is a complete mess. The source code of VVVVVV is a work of art in comparison. What holds me back are 1. I'm ashamed to reveal the monstrosity 2. I'm afraid the code is too messy for anyone to be able to make contributions 3. it will make it much easier for hackers to find exploits. It's a shame because I think the game would be really…
There are plenty of people looking to get into the games industry, and working on a shipped/existing project can be much less daunting than building your own thing. It might take a bit of time but I'm sure you could find some collaborators, maybe through game jams or meetups?
Also, everyone writes messy code. I wouldn't stress too much about that part.
p.s. Congrats on shipping it! :-)
https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...