Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005 From: Honolulu, Hawaii Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SurrenderMonkey Steve, First, let me thank you (again) for your enormous commitment to this project. I cannot over-emphasize what a great job you are doing. That being said - lately it seems that there is an enormous focus on relatively inconsequential graphics issues, and I worry that you are being consumed by them. Don't get me wrong - graphics count (a little). But this game will not live or die on graphics, as you know. You don't need to seek input regarding every single tiny graphical issue. I am far more interested in game mechanics and AI. I have never programmed anything, but I have directed many large projects. Forgive me if I am speaking out of school, but I just want to suggest (to all of us) that we may be indulging in a bit of picking lint from our navels when there are much more significant concerns. INCOMING! My posts cover anywhere from 5% to 20% of what I am working on. Most of the forum members would have zero interest in what I actually do during a work day. For example, I got a new version of the compiler (Delphi 2006) on Monday and was working on installing it when the waterworks from above started. Delphi 2006 didn't like the compiled packages from Delphi 2005. Getting these packages to work took me 3 weeks just about 1 year ago when I first received the source code for CWIF (Chris had been using Delphi 7). Trying to recreate the CWIF packages/libraries under Delphi 2006 revealed that thousands of changes I have made over the last year adversely affected that code. So, for the last 3 days (in midst of the workmen and with blast fans going continuously) I have been restructuring underlying routines/code. 42 easy ones done, 5 really ugly ones remaining. As a small part of this effort, I have pulled constants and 'static' variables out of modules and placed them all a single Pascal unit which has gone from 0 lines of code to about 1000 in the last 3 days. I have just discoverd that under Delphi 2005 code using "with ABC, begin ... end" would skip the processing part if ABC were nil but that doesn't happen under Delphi 2006. Consequences are that checks for nil are now needed. However, ... I have been making a concerted effort to remove "with" statements over the past 4 months (when I learned they were officially deemed a poor coding techinique by the programming community). I had never used them myself but the CWIF source code I inherited contained, roughly, 10,000 instances of them. In general, I try to have 3 or 4 mini-projects going at any one time so I do not get 'stale' working on the same thing continuously. Until this interruption with Delphi 2006 occurred my list was: - Game Record Log routines (2000 to do, expect to finish them by the end of July), - NetPlay (need to push this as far as I can go with what Dan Hatchen has given me and then get togehter with Dan to work out the rest - fairly easy to do but has to have at least 50% of my focus to be worked on profitably) - Screen layouts (there are some fatal bugs in the code reported by the beta testers) - Scandinavian map (finish the data changes Claus mostly completed) - Weather effects (have Rob make changes in accordance with feedback from the forum). Not even on my basic list, but present nonetheless, are responding to tasks that others are doing: - Player interface design by Rob - Naval units writeups by Terje & Fred - Optional Rules writeups by Mziln Trust me, weather graphics is the least of my concerns and are more of a diversion from other things.
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Steve Perfection is an elusive goal.
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