Keeping up morale?

[Baker]

Just a general engine project question.

How do you keep up morale when something explodes in your face? Or explodes in your face 20 times? Or you get a bug that is insidiously hard to identify the cause?

Putting aside the 10 years of work in DarkPlaces, FTEQW comes across to me as the engine most likely to have had countless setbacks. Then again, MH must have his plans foiled 30 times in building an engine almost from scratch with DirectQ, yet in a year and a half plus it is here. I know R00k has had modifications blow up on him when he'd prefer to be doing other things (like Qrack 1.90 and you couldn't walk up steps or something like that). I used the "Rich Whitehouse" bbox fix that R00k posted only for someone to complain that one of the hipnotic map keys fell out of the level.

At the moment, I'm messing with the PSP build of ProQuake and the PSP engine gives me more headaches than any engine ever. It makes playing around with Linux libraries look like child's play. You have code that works in any other operating system and the PSP hates it.

My answer to the engine morale question: there is no question ... you never give up, you stay 'til the fights won.

Still ... some days it is easier to say that than others.

[revelator]

more or less

i usually just walk away but through the magic of restless grey matter combined with a natural stubberness i allways seem to end up at the keyboard later with fresh ideas.

else i just go kick my neighbors dog nah

[Spike]

Never give up, never surrender!

The key thing is to be aware of the possible side-effects a single change can have, and to keep those side-effects confined to the module/unit in which you're breaking.

Keep it clean, fix the actual bug and not the side effects.

If you do find you have an 'unsolvable' bug, just put it aside for a few weeks and come back to it fresh. In doing so, you'll likely end up aproaching the bug from a different angle, and that can be all that is required to fix it. Multiple checkouts of the same repository can help, if you're disciplined enough to make the fixes in the correct one (if I remember, LH has about 5 such checkouts). Personally I'm not quite disciplined enough for that, so I just commit only the files that I believe to be okay - which generally means I forget to commit everything required, but hey.

Treat bugs as a challenge. Something to be understood and solved. Think of the satisfaction you'll get when you finally find out what it was. An individual solved bug can be as (mentally) rewarding when solved as a programming in an entire new model format or whatever.

[mh]

[Irritant]

[ceriux]

[Baker]

[Mexicouger]

[mankrip]

It took me about two years to figure out how to implement translucent water in Makaqu. From the very start I felt I was never going to figure it out, I kept looking at the code and feeling myself completely dumb. Several times I tried to understand it, several times I tested different approaches, and failed every time until someday it started to become clear to me and then I got it right.

I gave up a lot of times on implementing it, but for some reason I kept coming back to try again.

In my case it's like I have no choice, I simply know when I won't definitely give up on something.

Also, keeping your mental health in shape helps a lot. I keep my personal life completely away from my development blog, and this helped me a lot to keep any negative thoughts out of my head when I'm coding, which in turn also made me feel better.

Spending some time with the family, cleaning the house, and generally doing productive things that aren't computer-related can also help.

[Mexicouger]

[Junrall]

[mankrip]

[frag.machine]

[mankrip]

Nowadays I'm using Code::Blocks instead and I have , so I don't have this problem anymore.

And I'm still procrastinating about using Google's Mercurial repository, mainly because it will take a lot of boring work to make it track all changes from the vanilla Quake source to all released versions of Makaqu, and I feel more motivated to do coding work instead. Figuring out how to implement color blending in BSP entities is being far more interesting, and it's something I was going to do anyway.

[revelator]

also a codeblocks user its rather good

if you look for a mercurial client i got one in my own compiler suite. native mingw python build also. might be an idea to see if the codeblocks plugin coders would find it usefull to include mercurial as a plugin.