Re: Software Architecture/Design

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Mike Shaver <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Brandon Van Every <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Why not work on a segment of gamedom that would admit less than a 100%
>> performant programming language?

i.e. many kinds of web, mobile, or casual development.  Could even
mean specializing one's career in game scripting rather than game
engines, if you insist on working on those big AAA projects.

>> Why not work for a company that believes in that, or create one?
>
> Is that what you're doing?

I'm an indie, so yes.

> I suspect a lot of us would be interested
> in more background on what you've found when doing so, and what you
> would do differently in the future, etc.

I'm also a pathological soloist.  Software engineering, for me
personally, is about choosing approaches that do not drive me nuts,
make me personally productive, and contribute positively to my ongoing
morale.  Because when you're going it alone, morale is the primary
determinant of whether you'll get anything done.  "I like this" is an
important statement to be making on a regular basis.  When you find
yourself saying, "This is pain and torture," you tend to slack off and
avoid the pain, so little gets done.  I don't have a fat paycheck to
compensate me for the pain.  If something utterly sucks about C++ or
3D graphics, then I get to directly experience it.

It also means that I personally do not want millions of lines of code
to deal with.  Many of these software engineering problems amount to
the simple difficulty of trying to understand piles and piles of
meaningless code.  I don't care much for open source because the code
is typically not documented well enough to be terribly useful.  For
many problems, I can spend far more time trying to understand what or
why in someone else's code, than if I just wrote my own.  Also the
open source world is usually more conservative in what it successfully
produces, so whereas you can get mature C++ 3D engines, you can't get
mature F# 3D engines.  You can get C# or Java engines, although I
haven't much investigated their quality yet, as I only recently made
the decision to abandon C++.  SlimDX has DirectX 11 support, so that
may be one way to get a F# binding for DX11.  Another may be to use F#
directly, as F# is an appropriate tool for parsing and translation.
Another may be to find a C# 3D engine and F#-ify it.  Writing the 3D
engine myself has the attraction of being small, and simple enough
that I can maintain it.  It would depend on what an off-the-shelf C#
engine brings to the table.  I didn't care much for Ogre3D (C++) and
that's the "best" open source 3D engine out there, so I started
gearing up for "if you want it done right...."


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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