How I envy developers working on arcade games, or anything that has a very simple game ‘state’ that can be easily saved and loaded with no grief. For the game I am currently working on (announcement later this month), it’s a bit of a pain, because the actual game ‘state’ is horrendously involved, and every single byte of it has to be loaded and saved perfectly. The problem is mainly due to my tendency to code systems that have a huge number of objects that all have pointers to each other, in complex and arcane ways.

In theory, stitching everything back together after a load is fairly easy, but in practice, it’s a bit of a pain, and the REAL pain is to know that it has all worked perfectly. if 99% of the pointers are right, and 1 isn’t, then I have a horrible dangling bug somewhere…

My current process for preventing this is to have the game completely save out it’s state and load it’s state back in every turn (it’s a turn based game). At the moment, due to arcane debugging issues this is horribly slow, but eventually will be super fast. At least doing it this way means that during development I’ll spot any save/load inconsistencies really quickly.

I’m aching to get on with some GUI stuff to make it look nice, but I’ve learned the hard way that I have to put that off until the foundations work better. Better to have it stable now, rather than fix it later.

I use the odd bit of code that has char* in it. There I’ve said it. It feels like a big confession. I bet some programmers just sprayed their coffee everywhere. I’m sorry. They say the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

I’m a very very productive game developer. I churn out a lot of very very big and ambitious games. One of the ways I manage that is that I don’t change my ways unless I can make a really good argument for doing so. I never learned what on earth .Net was, no I don’t mind it’s passing. I don’t really know C#. I have no idea what design patterns exist other than singleton. I have no idea what a UML diagram is (is that even a thing? I don’t know…)

You have no idea what a huge big deal it was for me to switch from directx7 to directx9. That took some doing*, and it’s why I still use DX, not OpenGL (which would make apple mac ports far easier and cheaper).

While I’m in confession mode, here are a few other howlers you might be amused by:

• I manually type out for() loops without using for_each()
• I use FILE* not the stream stuff
• I use my own GUI library, and Input code, not third party stuff. In fact I wrote my own hash table code too. The only stuff I rely on is STL, and only partially use std::string

Scary huh?

Why am I such a luddite? Well it comes down to time. If I had regular bugs that I could attribute to passing around char* now and then rather than a std::string, then things would be different, but I know all the functions that handle chars better than I know STL, so I code much faster that way. I have a slight niggling doubt that for_each() is as fast as it should be. I can’t remember the iostream syntax, so I use FILE*, because frankly my file handling code was written years ago and still works fine, so why change?

I see a lot of coders jump on every code bandwagon, and learn new stuff all the time. They are constantly rewriting their whole engine, and constantly going back and changing the code they wrote a month ago. They rarely ship games, and very rarely ship large ones. To me, it always makes sense to make occasional big jumps, rather than constantly fight to keep up with the latest stuff. I have no idea what was in Directx8, it passed me by totally. I’ll maybe move to directx12 (more likely opengl).

It may make me seem old fashioned, but it’s incredibly productive.

*it’s not learning the API, but building a bug-free FAST engine that correctly encapsulates the API that takes time.