Phew, just fiinished some tough code...

Have any of you been defeated or nearly defeated by some nasty code?

God, I was getting really stuck on this code to make a level select map which is bigger than the screen zoom in and scroll to the next location, then zoom out once selected. It took me ages to do for some reason, I'm not feeling particularly thick today, but there were a lot of factors and lots of maths. I sorta enjoyed the challenge but also felt frustrated by the problems. Thank god BMax has got a decent debugger, it's much better than BPlus's. Now it's done, I'm really peased with it. It's *way* cool :-)



Also I got really stuck the other day. I had made a continuously scrolling background and thought it would be cool to have it zooming in and out at the same time. It *almost* worked except for every time it wrapped there was a small jerk. I kept thinking I had the solution time after time, but none of them worked. I wasted hours on it and finally gave up and left it as just plain scrolling. I hate being defeated by stuff. I may come back to it another day, but it's totally not important I just can't let it lie ...

i'm always interested in hearing what other coders are doing... it may come in handy one day... (when i raid the archives and pilfer their logic )

:)

--Mike

Not really, but I have been defeated by a lack of enthusiasm and inspiration for the SRX front end. I hate doing front ends....I've ditched the 3d garage and gone for a clean and modern white background look, with simple text menus overlaid. Much simpler to modify and add stuff, which is important as I seem to constatly be adding options to tone down the graphics to get the speed up...Blitz really doesn't like lots of surfaces.

Sometimes I'll hit a rough spot, but I don't mind it so much if it's localized. What I hate, though, is where changing one thing requires changes throughout the rest of the code (usually a result of deciding to add additional functionality which should have been included at the design stage). Unfortunately, better planning brings its own problem...

I like starting a fresh project, and I certainly like wrapping one up and putting the final touches on at (an all-too-rare occurence <g>). But that vast, boring in-between is bad: where you've been coding for days and have nothing to show for it since nothing will work until everything is in place. I used to minimize this by putting in bare minimal functionality so that the skeleton of the program would work, then going back in and adding new features, but that often led to the problem above. Better planning avoids it, but increases the "wandering across the vast desert" feeling in the middle.

So, that's what provides the biggest threat of defeat for me. Maybe I'll find the ideal "middle" approach someday.

Nasty code sucks...

I did a basic nuclear reactor simulator which I haven't yet shown off here for some reason... it originally did heat simulation, but that whole system (Named UHEM, for Unrealistic Heat Energy Materialization - which, though unrealistic, went fine with the... er... Monte-Carlo (totally unrealistic) nature of everything else) was a total mess.
Needless to say, I gave up and instead opted to have the reactor being simulated be completely invincible, with the brilliant excuse that a heat simulation would make things "needlessly complicated".
Except for the day of pulling my hair out beforehand, it was great.

And then there was the sad realization weeks later of how I could have solved the problem, complete with a beautiful real-time colour graph...

with me it's usually not coding... though i rarely get as deep into it as some of you guys do... it's more becoming dissatisfied with my results...

after playing a round of Quake4, my stuff, well... it just doesn't look good enough to sell...

:(

--Mike

thanks for your feedback all, some interesting points of view.

Like Vorderman I've always hated coding front-ends. Its not that I find them difficult to do, its just so damn tedious.

Oh, I once spent four hours trying to find out why my game was flickering like merry hell, only to discover I'd accidentally commented out SetBuffer BackBuffer(). In my defence, this was during work on Double Top and was five years ago.

Red, graphics are becomeing less and less important as people get a taste of just how bad games can get when they are forced to just make pretty eye candy. I'm sure your game plays better than Quake 4, which wouldn't be hard.

Grey, something about this screen shot just doesn't look right.... i think it feels very flat because he BG is so bright... It doesn't feel like space as much as it looks like a painting of space.... I think the darks are too light and the lights are too dark...

Hello.

It's not space, it's an angry jellyfish. Sheesh!

I remember getting particularly stressed when trying to do a route finding algorithm. It took long enough to figure out what I was doing and that was fine, but then I left it a while went back to it and, because I hadn't commented at all and had lots of ocs, ocy, ox, oy, ooy, oox, ix, iy, iix, iiy, oix, oiy type variables it made absolutely no bloody sense whatsoever. So I had to trace the whole damn lot of it just to figure out what I'd done previously. That nearly beat me. Needless to say, I commented it well and described variables thereafter.

Goodbye.

I don't let myself be defeated by coding tasks really. I do sometimes lose entheusiasm (SP) though.

Well, in B3D I could do pretty much whatever I wanted and I knew the limits. Max is a little harder since the language isn't where the limits are, and the engines in use are still new so new limits come up all the time.


Just last night I got confused and thought a feature didn't exist then I found out I was looking in the wrong area of code for it :)

First of all, I think you're underestimating how much work went into Quake 4.

Secondly, despite how you and I may feel about Quake 4, it sold rediculous amounts of copies, so clearly some people do care about playing aesthetically pleasing video games.

As for coming close to being beaten by tough code: frequently.

Being beaten by tough code: nope. It's not an option.



There's also the third: people like to kill things. Quake 4 is just one of the many games providing a way to kill things.

Don't know about you, but I'd guess the amount of FPS players outnumbers the submarine simulation players by a great deal. Personally, I prefer the former. It's more immersive than a bunch of panels with things that control stuff such as the rudder. Really, that just makes me feel like I'm not part of the game but instead telling the game how I want things done, rather than going around and doing what I want to do.

DampeS8N: Thanks for the feedback. I might take a look at it (when my Photoshop Elements 4 arrives from Ebay). It looks worse in jpg form anyway, oh and those squares glow and the ship rotates. Also it's just part of my framework demo so looks aren't 100% important. [edit] just tweak it a bit and it's better. The other problem is that this image was originally smaller but I've scaled it up so it looks a bit fuzzy.

I've got Quake 4 sitting here on my desk, but I've been playing Bricks of Egypt instead or just coding. It looks fancy, and sure sells, but it ain't no good (imho).

SO! you are makign a breakout clone! YES... breakout bonus !

Should have gone the cubic splines route.

Selling is good. If you can sell 100.000 copies of a mediocre game, or 100.000 copies of a good game, there really doesn't seem to be much incentive to put in the extra effort. Except professional pride of course, but that's about as common as common sense, and worth about as much too.

Ah, that's it.... because you scaled it up, it feels like it is closer to me than the ship, makeing it feel very flat and hurts my brain a little.... I'd still make it darker all around to try to sink it into the BG.. hehe

I knew it wasn't for anything real... but the better it looks, the more likely it is to work out for you... no reason to give people the chance to suspect a bug based on your screenies...

I find in my own code there are usually so many nested if statements at times that, because of my inconsistent indentation habits, I can never work out which 'endif' goes with which 'if' statement - which can be important if you want to suddenly put and 'else' into it.

Never heard of code indention?? :)

As he said :)

BTW, Whats an indention? :P

uh, no I'm not...lol.
Yeah I know, that's why I want my demo looking good as it make's people thing the framework is good too.

I'm pretty sure that's like when you're in the dentist's chair and they have your mouth held open to apply tools ;-)

Tell you what: I hate coding at all, no matter if it's gui, 3d or whatever. I'm after the result, the expectation on what might come out is the fun, not the coding...

I like the result too, but the jouney is important...

If it's just a bit of code I'm messing around with to try out an idea, there will come a point where I'll just bin it if things aren't working out.

If it's code for a 'serious' project, there's absolutely no way I'd give up on solving a problem. In fact, the tougher the problem, the more annoyed and determined I get to solve it. There have been several occasions where I've become so annoyed and determined that I've actually said "Hah! Gotcha, you f****r!" out loud, when finally nailing the problem. :/ You get a great feeling of satisfaction when finally solving the problem, though.

Leaving an 'important' problem unsolved isn't an option, otherwise it'll just burrow into my brain and I can't think about anything else. Man Vs. Machine and there's no way I'm letting the machine win. :P

I think being able to stick with tough problems until you find a way to overcome them is a very important part of being a coder. A successful one, anyways.

Yep but beeing able to come up with a nice solution for a maybe difficult problem without giving up or f***ing it up (just in case Gfk is watching this :O) isn't a measurement for fun - at least for me. Fun is more...well, where are the girls... ;O) *ohhohh hiding*

yeah hiding in my bed.

Unfortuneatly ... yes :(

@Grey
You've misunderstood the hiding... ;O)

taumel: dis-gust-ing ;-)

*laughing* ;O)

Yah, if you get into a rough spot with code it can be very discouraging making you want to give up on it or not see the point in it. It's the people with the patience and perseverance that finish stuff.

true... with me though, it's usually a rough spot with the artistic side of the dev process...

--Mike

I've been defeated by code quite a few times. I once had two map editors, one that built levels out of squares (BlackLightning), and another that loaded levels of many formats for 'linking' sections together (Project Mapper). The BlackLightning project's maps ended up containing quite a lot of extra vertices and polygons, and this would cause speed problems in Project Mapper.

I decided to write a processing program for the maps, which would simply load all the triangles of the map file, combine whatever triangles could be combined, and spill out a simplified file. It all sounded simple, but after a couple days of working on that project, it obviously wasn't.

The trouble was, I wasn't able to run my code until the whole conversion project was completed. And as such, it contained quite a lot of bugs, which I couldn't iron out because I couldn't determine which section of the code the bugs were in.

...umm, anyway, yeah I've been forced to give up on quite a few projects, for one reason or another. The Project Mapper program I was working on was given up, because editing maps was much too time-consuming. It was ultimately a design flaw, but a major one. The editor ran horribly slow, and despite all my efforts to improve performance speed, it didn't help. But I did carry the project far enough to experiment with real-time map loading.

Many other projects have failed after I dig into coding them. I discover problems I'm unable to overcome. The root of the problem at hand becomes so large that I have to scratch the whole project.

Never beaten by code, always by motivation. I can no longer count the number of times I've restarted a certain project because it's been so long since the last time I touched it I'd completely forgotten how most of it works (comments neer seen to actually help me), or because there's some new tool or tech that I've bought from somewhere that I decide I NEED to implement into the project, which requires major rewrites of nearly a lot of things. And then of course, looking at crap-gfx(tm) doesn't help motivate either. Usually a new FF or GTA will come out and I'd stop working and not come back to it for 6 months. Maybe one day my poor little bubby will be running on MS Windows Floatform OS2036. I don't think I will be ready to die until it's done.

Toby: well at least you've got a target. In fact if you never complete it, maybe you'll live a *long* time ...