Messages

1

Programming / Re: How do I actually use libtcod?

« on: March 31, 2015, 02:50:22 PM »

I don't hunt down bugs, I know where they are. Kaduria has 49K lines of code and 5 open bugs and I know where they are.

Then I admire your programming prowess. A rate of 10k lines / bug is ... remarkable.

For us mortals, however, debuggers are useful tools.

2

Programming / Re: How do I actually use libtcod?

« on: March 31, 2015, 08:10:12 AM »

Not having any use for a debugger is more often a sign of doing only trivial programming than having incredible programming discipline.

Ha! That was my thought, too. In a quarter century of coding, the only times I haven't used a debugger is when I've been in environments that don't have them.

Sure, you can work without them but why the hell would you - it drastically reduces the amount of time you spend hunting down bugs.

3

Programming / Re: Storing Changes for Persistent Zones

« on: March 18, 2015, 09:09:13 AM »

Do you want to optimize the save file size and if so, for what reason? If there is no reason, you can simply save everything.

That was my immediate thought too; sure, 20 years ago file space was precious and it was worth putting in the extra work to keep them small, but these days the filesizes involved in saving the entire map are pretty insignificant.

It'd certainly be neater to save a bunch of diffs instead, and if you want the fun of that programming challenge then go for it - but every hour you spend coding something utterly internal like this is an hour lost on code that actually affects gameplay.

4

Development Process & non-technical / Re: A cautionary tale for aspiring roguelike programmers

« on: February 21, 2015, 09:33:53 AM »

I write code for fun.

QFT.

Actually, I also write code for money - but I write roguelike code because I wanted to go back to playing in C, and that's not something that's much in demand commercially any more.

5

Development Process & non-technical / Re: A cautionary tale for aspiring roguelike programmers

« on: February 20, 2015, 08:50:24 PM »

The first is that these days people generally expect access to a solution rather quickly. The internet, basically. StackOverflow, Wikipedia, ready access to other people's source code and documentation make learning new things much easier!

Ha! You're not wrong; I'm (slightly) older than you and generally all we had to work with was (a) code you managed to wrestle out of comp.sources.games, and (b) the system header files.

I do sometimes wonder how the hell we managed to get anything done before Google was an option!