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Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

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Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#12

Post by TeMPOraL »

pud wrote: post #2

One of the things that's held back Windows and made it so complex, according to an MS engineer I recently spoke with who's been with the company since the 80's, is that it contains thousands of pieces of code to fix bugs in third-party software. In other words, there's code in Windows 7 that prevents crashing due to a rare bug in Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego v1.3 (hypothetical example). And so on.

Real example I heard on internship interview at MS:

Printers lie. Printers have embedded fonts and when you can use them instead rendering the text in software, the results end up better. But printers lie about which fonts they have and which characters are represented in them, so Word has (or used to have) this very big lookup table that basically tells "if you're printing on printer X from vendor Y, don't trust what it says about fonts and just send rendered text to it".

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#13

Post by forrestthewoods »

pjmlp wrote: post #10
rburhum wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a must read" for all Windows developers.

Other operating systems have similar issues as well.

I'll go one further and say all software has similar issues.

To give you a more concrete examples a game project I work on has many characters with skills. There is a lot of shared code across the skills, which is a good thing. A handful of skills are of the "charge" type. Press a button and lunge forward, each with it's own variation. Knockback targets, grapple targets, throw, throw backwards, apply buff to charger, apply debuff to victim, leave acid trail of damage, etc.

The whole setup has been built up over years and is tragically fragile today. Adding in a new charge variant requires being very careful you don't break any of the pre-existing skills. It may seem safe, and even appropriate, to make minor changes in the sequence of events but there's a good change it will break one skill in one particular case where multiple, infrequent combination of factors are in play.

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#19

Post by avbor »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #13
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other operating systems have similar issues as well.

I'll go one further and say all software has similar issues. To give you a more concrete examples a game project I work on has many characters with skills. There is a lot of shared code across the skills, which is a good thing. A handful of skills are of the "charge" type. Press a button and lunge forward, each with it's own variation. Knockback targets, grapple targets, throw, throw backwards, apply buff to charger,…

This is obviously off topic, but do you happen to work on a MOBA?
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