Wish-List for Dominions 4

[Gandalf Parker]

MaxWilson said:

I'd like to see collaboration with a company with a couple of very experienced old C hands and a great manager, who were willing to take direction from Kristoffer and Johan but would also hop to it when they said, "Yeah, that sounds like a great idea but it would be boring to implement. Why don't you write us a patch and we'll see if we like it?"

I can dream, anyway. : )

-Max

A game written in Basic on an Atari then gradually converted to C on Linux.. that would have to be one heck of a team to dive into that.

[HoneyBadger]

That sounds really scary!

I think the team's job would be to rewrite the game from the ground up in whichever language seemed the best (I'd love to see it in some form of Java, but I'm guessing that would be a poor choice), under the guidance of the Devs.

I'd guess that it would be significantly easier to re-do the game, maybe in a different language, now that it's been done once, than it was for the Devs to write the original, just because the whole concept is complete and working.

Probably, also, a lot of programming "shortcuts" could be taken in certain areas, where either more powerful tools/commands are available now that weren't previously available, or simpler methods can be used to achieve effects that were done 1 careful step at a time.

After all, it's easier to picture a stained-glass window from the viewpoint of a human looking at it from a distance, than it is as a fly crawling across it.

[MaxWilson]

[Off-topic but perhaps interesting to some]

"Rewrites Considered Harmful." This is such a common meme in the programming community that I'm having trouble locating the article I originally read on the subject, but here are two good articles, one short and one long:

http://www.ronkes.nl/blog/?2005-04-15-neverrewritecode

http://www.neilgunton.com/doc/rewrites_harmful

Redesign is good, refactoring is good. Rebuilding from the ground up tosses out years of accumulated design experience and bug fixes that you'd forgotten were necessary. If a program needs a redesign, do it a piece at a time as much as possible and test continuously so you know instantly when a refactoring breaks the existing functionality, because it's the functionality and not the prettiness of the code that matters most. (Pretty code helps you add NEW functionality, but that's later.)

-Max

[HoneyBadger]

Well, I don't know much about the functionality of specific langages-how versatile *is* "plain old" C? If it works-and it'll work in the future, why change it?

[MaxWilson]

Pretty versatile. It has some weaknesses, such as no runtime type protection, but you can do object-based programming, some object-oriented programming, block-structured, and regular old procedural programming. It interfaces well with tons of other languages. It's about as portable across platforms as Java is, which is to say you still have to be careful about hardware-dependent stuff. I'm aware of no compelling reason why a legacy project which is already in C should be rewritten in another language.

That said, I personally would never in a million years choose to start a new project in pure C unless the only other option was assembly (e.g., writing hardware drivers or software for NASA satellites with special hardware). The lack of runtime type safety makes me nervous (I'm counting things like dangling pointers as a type safety problem here), and it's also a rather verbose language. There's pros and cons, and I'm turned off by verbosity in the same way that I'm turned off by nations with capital-only mages. There, back on topic.

-Max

[Olive]

I'd be happy with a variable allowing to change the aspect ratio of the display for 16/9 or 16/10 screen owners.