Archive for March, 2010

True, dat

Posted in Coding on March 22nd, 2010 by MrCranky

Picked up on when reading through some old posts on the sweng_gamedev list, and had to be shared.

On 11 December 2009, Fabien Giesen wrote:
Abstraction provides leverage. This is well understood in one direction and not so well in the other direction.
The power of abstraction is that I can do with one line of code what might take me 100 lines otherwise. The problem is that I’m now writing code one 100-line-equivalent at a time :). Any conceptual flaws or minor misunderstandings present at the level I’m working on are amplified by a factor of 100 by the time the machine gets to see the code. This is a crucial thing to understand when working in a team, where the user and the designer of a module aren’t necessarily the same person.
This is so true. While I’m all for abstraction and making your code clean and high level, you really, really have to be aware of what that means.

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Newly an uncle

Posted in Random Stuff, Tales from the grind-stone on March 15th, 2010 by MrCranky

So after a weekend up north in Glencoe, trying to get my head back in some kind of productive space, I hear from my sister that she’s given birth to not one, but two miniature people today. So I’ve raised a glass or two to my sister’s new family, which pretty much excludes the possibility that I’ll do anything useful tonight.

Suffice to say that while I’ve continued to work on CruiseControl.NET plugins, I’ve yet to write up anything useful that could be condensed into a blog post. My article on employee Terms and Conditions for IndieVision.net has been shunted to one side, again. I had a productive meeting on Friday with one of the developers of Visual Studio, making an effort to persuade them to include some games development friendly features with their next version (not 2010, the one after); hopefully one or two of them will make it in and I’ll have improved the development eco-system just a little bit.

But in general I’m still struggling with the long commutes to Dundee, and the limited amount of time in the evenings to be productive. So on that rather downbeat note, I shall finish up, and place a tick in the entry on my task list for “Development Blog”. Hopefully future entries will be more avuncular and jolly. Wow, how long have I been waiting to use that adjective to describe myself… 🙂

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On the move

Posted in Tales from the grind-stone on March 8th, 2010 by MrCranky

Aha! Just downloaded the WordPress app for iPhone, we shall see if writing blogs on the move lets me be more reliable with my posts. As I write this particular draft (lamenting the iPhone’s keypad) I’m on a bus on Princes St, moving between Microsoft at the East End and our own office at the West End. This afternoon I’ll be talking through our ideas for iPhone apps with Tim.

That’s right folks, we’re now all set up for iPhone development, MacBook, iPod Touch, iPhone, and a raft of ideas. As I’m swamped at the moment, Tim’s taking the lead on all this, and our first project will be a small productivity app that he came up with. More details and screenshots as we get closer to completion…

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