Re: [glob2-devel] We must do a game, not an engine

[Cyrille Dunant]

The short: we have a semantic problem. “rewrite” is a bad word.

The long:

On Thursday 26 April 2007 16.14:39 Kai Antweiler wrote:
> > I sure can't prevent him. And as long as it works as well at the end,
> > never mind.
>
> The bad thing is that you insult Bradley's work and try to prevent it.
> Also you constantly propose very bad code design.

No. In fact I have not proposed code design. Ah, yes, I suggested the 
functions used to read old maps could be kept. What horrible design!

> > But I am afraid that the "rewrites" are never quite complete (see nct and
> > his skins)...
>
> Uh, trying to make feel Bradley feel bad about his editor rewrite?

What if nct feels bad about his code being arbitrarily dumped ?


> > This does not mean they are unclean! Optimized code is painful to look
> > at. Example: I needed sparse matrices.
> >
> > 1) std::map<std::pair<size_t, size_t>, double> -- 0 lines of code, works.
> > 2) operator overloading, valarrays and dedicated classes. speedup x 10 --
> > 50 lines of code
> > 3) clever aliasing tricks to get rid of temporaries. speedup x 3 -- 500
> > lines of complicated code
>
> You forgot:
> 4) implementing everything in assembler

Not portable unfortunately :)

> > Uhhh, writing a campaign would make the game more valuable. With _no_
> > additional code.
>
> And it wouldn't improve the code.  So glob2 would slowly die, if we just
> do campaigns.  Anyone for allowing improving code and creating campaigns?
> I am.

Glob2 is slowly dying from lack of players. a game dies because no one plays, 
not because it is not developed anymore.

> By the way:  Bradley created our tutorial.

Excellent!

> > You mean like rewriting the map format instead of fixing the desyncs?
>
> I could say:  "You mean like doing animations instead of fixing the
> desyncs?"

Ha. Probably I should not have. Because obviously this game nct and nuage did, 
and I contributed to is a putrid pile of crap.

> Please stop to command us around!
> We are working for free.  Get this into your head.

So am I, believe it or not.

> > I mean,
> > everyone can do what he well pleases, but let us not be deluded on what
> > is actually useful _from_the_player's_point_of_view_.
> >
> >From the players point of view.  The unit-building allocation was needed.
>
> We talked about it last year.  Steph and nuage started a rewrite.

No, they started an new unit allocation mechanism algorithm. Not a rewrite.

> Believe it or not I have dumped games with really nice graphics before,
> simply because the gaming sucked.

Everyone has. But no one tried a game with horrid gfx in the first place.
Of course, what is horrid depends on when in time we are :)

> So doing nice graphics will not make a game.
> It will help.  And I appreciate it very much.  But a game consists of
> engine and other code, graphics, sound, maps, ...
> Just picking something out and telling everybody who works on something
> else that he's harming the project or at least not contributing is ... -
> bad!

We are in a dynamic where bit after bit gets rewritten with no gain for the 
player. I don't see why or when it should or would stop.

Then I am afraid the game will die, because it will have the ultimate engine, 
and no game.

> > Because we are forgetting the players with all this rewrite talk, are we
> > not?
>
> Are we forgetting the coders when we talk about campaigns?
> I don't think so.  I can keep more than one subject in mind.

You miss the point. The _only_ interesting subject is the players. What you 
do, everything you do, is ultimately for the players. If you do something 
that will not, in any way, shape or form help the players, however indirectly 
(making code more maintainable for example is in fact good) you are hurting 
the project.

> And again the rewrites are very necessary.

Refactoring. not rewrites. Rewrites is when you decide “I cannot go on with 
this crap”, remove the files and start from scratch.

Refactoring is when you structure the code for better legibility, separate 
better functionality.

Rewrite means “This code is horrid”

Refactor means “This code is hard to read” 

> Without them glob2 will go down.  No one will be able to work
> on it anymore.

But with them, and if no one cares about making a game, it will still die...

> > What are the issues they raise? what works not so well?
>
> Everytime I looked into user wishes and thought this should be easy
> to implement, I recognised that the code so tangled that I can't do it
> without harming the whole game.

Example ?

> > What are the game balance issues?
>
> Are you telling me that the blue globs are stronger than the red ones?

No, a game balance issue was for example the excessive power of the harvest 
attacks.

> > All of those points are important, and not one requires a rewrite, only
> > tuning.
>
> Ah, only tangling up the code some more.
> Brilliant!

uhh To get rid of abovementioned issue, nct needed about 5 mins of code...

> > I an getting angry.
>
> I know.  So you try to insult everybody so that you feel better?

yes.

> > THE CODE NEEDS NO REWRITE. IT NEEDS REFACTORING.
>
> Bigger letters but still fundamentally wrong - sorry.

look up rewrite vs refactoring. You might realise that the issues you raise 
are solved by refactoring. In many case, this is what Brad does, and not 
rewrite.

But you still call it a rewrite, which is insulting.

> > most of the work in making a game is not code, it is graphics and writing
> > and maps. Look at the number of each profession at Blizzard :)
>
> And I really appreciate every commiter of graphics.
> I tried to, and failed.  Face it.  Just because you would like more
> graphics contributed, doesn't mean that this will happen.

I am sadly aware of that. It happens sometimes, though. But it is rare.

> > Once upon a time, a TODO was done which essentially said that the 1.0 is
> > the current state, debugged, with gfx and campaign finished.
> >
> > Are we working in that direction? NO.
>
> And we never should go in this direction again, because it
> turns developers away.

versus turning other contributers away? 

> I pray that you won't succeed in scheming this nonsence back into
> the project, because I don't think glob2 would survive it.

Scheme? what scheme, this is an open ML!

> > Actually, from Rama's drawing, I did ~90% of the graphics.
> >
> > And you know what?
> >
> > they need a redraw.
>
> Huch?  Ergo crap?

well, yeah. They are wayyyy worse than say, those of starcraft. 

> Your insulting Cyrille!
> Wasn't that your reasoning?

Yes. Absolutely. The difference is that I don't care whether people criticise 
my work. I actually appreciate it if the criticism is cogent. I am however 
sensitive to the constant dragging in the mud of nuage and nct's work.

And unfortunately, you cannot refactor drawings. You can touch them up 
however.

-- 
-- Cyrille Dunant
-- EPFL-IMX-LMC 
--

   If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.

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