Quoting: loggeIt's me playing Sky Force reloaded

Just got that yesterday... addictive little shoot'em up.

EDIT: Just got Sky Force Anniversary yesterday... figured I would try the original before buying the sequel

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To be clear on something, the OpenRA game engine is open source under the GPL, however, the actual games of course aren't. Thankfully, they were released for free by EA a few years ago so OpenRA simply downloads the free releases.

Oh, I did not realize this... I thought you needed the original disks to play. Is that true for everything that OpenRA plays? Dune, Red Alert, and Tiberium Dawn?

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And here I thought that linux would take a nose dive after banning all linux machines named "catbot". :D

Edit: spelling

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Quoting: ColomboIt just... there is this book called Clean Code. It became influential because it had good advices. And guy there says if the code is good, it doesn't need comments and that comments are sign of bad code that isn't readable.

And a lot of people adopted this approach.

Colombo, you already rebuked this approach with your earlier comment:

Quoting: ColomboOften, what is important is not comment what function does. You can see it if the code is well written. More important is to know why the code does a certain thing.

With clean code, yes, it should be easy to know what something does... but reading code alone does not and can not tell you why it was done a particular way.

Personally, I also like to add tidbits of other areas of the codebase that should be looked at if something changes because it may be affected or tightly integrated with the logic in the area I am currently changing.

I also use comments to keep track of changes to the code. While I do use source control, when I am digging through code I don't always check the date of every file to see when it was last changed. Those quick comments at the top save me a lot of time.

While good naming conventions can tell you the source of where variables are coming from, I will use comments if I need to go a little further.

An extra 5 or 10 minutes of creating comments when I write some code can save me hours later, in 6 months from now when I need to modify code or when I am hunting for bugs.

For the record, some comments are useless:
print(variable_name); // writes the variable to the screen
that is pretty obvious and useless.

However...
safe_print(variable_name); // variable_name contains special characters and needs to have the output sanitized
That can be quite useful and save time and heartaches later.

I can not agree with this philosophy of code not needing comments. IMHO, that is horrible advice. I doubt anyone who believes in it has ever written code with any real complexity. They surely have not gone back to old code six months later, (or someone else's code) and tried to figure out why something is happening.

I suspect that many like the advice of not creating comments because they are too lazy to do it in the first place and are not advanced enough to recognize the significance.

I am a damn good developer. With that knowledge, I realize that I still make mistakes. I want to ensure that when I go back and look for those mistakes that I have every tool available to me to help find them in the quickest way. Comments help... a lot.

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Quoting: GuestI can vouch for the necessity of code comments. Why things are done this way, or not that way, and what certain black magic code actually does. The latter almost always have more comments than code, just to explain it.
Doesn't mean code is unreadable of course. Proper interfaces hide a lot of the more intricate incantations, keeping overall design from plunging into insanity.
Especially with larger teams, good comments and documentation (and they can often be one & the same thanks to tools like doxygen) are an absolute must.

I have worked on large teams, small teams, and now I am working independently. Useful comments are helpful regardless of team size.

Also, yes proper interfaces (and functions) can also be useful in reducing overall code complexity. When you put the most complex code behind this, you make it so that the complex code only needs to be modified when absolutely necessary; which in turn helps avoid creating bugs.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThat said, at my previous job, the developers there were always told that if their code was too complex that people couldn't just look at it and it needed a comment to say what the code did, then they were doing it wrong, and they were chastised for using comments at all.

I think that's idiotic, because some complex functions need to be... well complex enough that a comment should be used. What are your thoughts on that?

Complex code is sometimes necessary. I agree that when code is complex, it should be commented. Even when code is pretty easy, a comment can help.

When you write code, the idea of exactly what it does and how it does it is fresh in your mind immediately after you write it. However, go back to that same code after 6 months of working on a different project and sometimes even the simple things are not as simple as you remember. I try to write my code with the idea that in 6 months, I will be back to change something and need to re-learn what I did. I write comments to remind me of certain details of why I wrote it that way initially.

One pet-peeve of me in that respect is variable naming. Far too often I see people use two letter variable names. Many languages do not limit the size, use it. For example, when everything is fresh in your mind, "nlg" may obviously mean "number of linux games", but 6 months later it won't be so obvious. Just write "NumLinuxGames" as a variable name instead. It will help you remember 6 months later, and help you self-document the code due to increased readability. (some complain about the increased code length or characters to type, but that argument falls on deaf ears when you consider the amount of code that gets cut/pasted and the ability to search and replace.)

Sadly there are too many coders that do not value comments at all. They obviously have never tried to read their own crap code after the 6 month mark. My favorite editor is Sublime Text [External Link], which allows for color themes. The number of themes available that make comments nearly invisible (e.g. light grey text on slightly lighter grey background) is astonishingly high.

This is why I feel sympathy for porters... when re-writing code, you have know idea what you are getting yourself into, until after you start. You may get lucky and find well structured and documented code... or you may find spaghetti code implementing obscure function calls that is lucky that it works at all. Most cases will likely be somewhere in the middle, but no one can tell until after they start to dig into it.

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I ended up buying Space Pirates and Zombies 2 [External Link] which is currently 30% off.

g000h mentioned World of Goo and Dungeon Warfare. Both great games and worthy of a look even without a sale. (and Dungeon Warfare 2 is in the works, but not released yet.)

Oxygen Not Included is also a fun little builder game that is worth a look. It is currently in Early Access, but quite playable. They are having regular content updates about every 6 weeks. I'm not sure how much more they are adding, but one example is that they plan on having "advanced research" tasks, but you do not have anything that will let you research past "intermediate" now. They just recently (less than one month ago) added linux support which I have found to be quite stable. BUT... I think it is only 20% off right now... I believe you only qualify for 40% off if you have a previous Klei games purchased already. (Like Shank, Don't Starve, or Darkest Dungeon.)

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Its development... it happens.

As any developer can tell you, making code changes can be a pain even if it is your own code. (Good developers do what they can through documentation and coding standards to minimize future pain.) When it is someone else's code, it is harder because you have to think like the other developer sometimes to understand how and why they wrote the code as it is. The fact that it is a different company with different coding standards makes it even harder.

In addition, this is a port... which means that functions and libraries used on the original may not be available on the other platform and need to be replaced or in a worse case scenario, written new from scratch. (Engines like Unity and/or Unreal minimize this by having the same functions and libraries available on all platforms, but 1) you have to use the middleware, 2) you would need to limit yourself to only use functions within that middleware, and 3) any bug in that middleware between platforms is a pain to fix.) Porting can be a pain, especially if the original developers don't make any attempt to keep the code friendly to porting.

TL;DR... Rewriting someone else's code can really be a pain in the ***.

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Quoting: liamdawe*sets a reminder to put a sticky-note on his monitor not to swear so much during livestreams* ;)

Now we know... we have to blame Liam...

Between you and Introversion (UK devs of Prison Architect), I now know how the Queens "proper English" got perverted into profanity laden tirades. :P

Here on the other side of the pond, we are all family friendly ;)

PROFANITY -- The one language that all developers know

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Sadly this same thing happens everywhere. It is truly how pirates hurt everyone... the little guy too, not just faceless corporations.

Kodi is having the same thing happen to it, it is grabbing a few recent headlines. People pull together some cheap hardware, install Kodi, and some add-ons and sell a pre-configured pirate box. Of course the original copyright owners don't like this and take a scorched earth policy trying to burn everything involved. Pirates usually get away and stay anonymous while the devs get entangled with the bad publicity and takedown requests. They can also get sued, even if they are not responsible for any actual piracy in the worse case scenario.

These people are leeches. They are earning money off the hard work of others. I know many times, I just read the synopsis of the article posted here on GoL. Please take the time and read the blog post [External Link]. It really gives an insight as to what scum we are referring to in this case.

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