🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <35F02376.836CDED0@accessone.com>,
  tmaster@accessone.com wrote:
> Bear mind mind too that game programmers live in a somewhat different world
> than application programmers. ... once the game is done, they move on.
> Cleaning up the code is really a worthless effort for them since they're
> never going to see it again.

AHEM! ... can you say debug? ... can you say Civ II v2.42?
can you say Magic the Gathering v1.3?  I knew you could.

> And while they're writing that game, they're staring at it all day
> everyday.  There's not going to be a maintenance programmer 3 years from
> now.  When it's done, it's done.  It gets shelved and they move on to the
> next project.

so you are saying Quake II was written ground->up?  I think
you need to lay off the mountain doo, it's affecting you adversely.

> Kind of a different story than a large application that has to have new
> versions made of it and stuff...  I'm not defending sloppy code, but I think
> that this is where some of it stems from.

Even games need to be updated from time to time, especially to fix bugs,
release new versions, add features, or just to make a new edition to make
more money (ala WarCraft, Tie Fighter, Eye of the Beholder, etc...)

There is no reason for the sloppy code iD released other than to protect their
butts from competition from up and coming coders who just need that little
push into a good routine to do function _x_.

I wonder how much they quake'd in their boots when the code to the original
Duke Nuke'm was released?  (scrollers suddenly became easy and mundane).

I tell you, when I got the Duke source, I almost cried that the magic behind
Jill was gone.  Oh well.  (I think the best bit was that they released code
for both C and Pascal...that rocked!  Pascal isn't dead, it's just breathing
hard)

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