Define Most Annoying Task?

[Baker]

Around July of last year seeing all the different software renderer stuffs, I started mess with software renderers.

And it made me nostalgic for WinQuake and I started playing with it. And then I came up with a rather tedious idea of trying to merge my modified FitzQuake with a software renderer.

It was an astronomical amount of work. And tedium.

But it is WAY easier than parsing text. I swear.

Why does parsing text always have to be a category 5 nightmare? Even when you have a plan.

I saw my auto-complete code and after thinking about it works great, but was piles of spaghetti --- I decided to fix it once and for all, but scientifically dissecting it into about 8 components with each being blissfully agnostic about its purpose (no globals, purpose agnostic), and writing some new buffer size safe functions to handle it.

I wish I had that time back. Seems like text + C + buffer sizes + moderate text manipulation is always a license to get burnt. The end result ended up being exactly what I wanted (but no really worth it), but it takes a stupid length of time to handle every edge case and you always discover more of them as you go along.

[mankrip]

[frag.machine]

[Spike]

the real problem with text is that it means something to the user rather than to software. its not logical, its not straight forward, you can't redefine what it means. to make matters worse, its inherantly variable length.

regarding unicode, this about sums up my feelings on the matter:

regarding AI, we won't have artificial inteligence until we stop defining inteligence as something that is as illogical as hunams.

[Baker]

[mankrip]

[Baker]

Endianness is basically dead AFAIK. The consoles, mobile and PCs, Macs all are little endian now or effectively support little Endian (i.e. Intel)

(Of course, other endians live on in, say, networking stuff. )

[gnounc]

[jitspoe]

Setting stuff up is often a pain. I might have to go with that one, but I think the most annoying task is trying to fix some bug that only happens 1/100 times and makes no sense...

[revelator]

And then find out its caused by an api change god one of those allmost drove me nuts when i tried to compile doom3 with msvc 2013, found out it was caused by ms changing the x87 floating point math to SSE instructions, the fix was silly easy (turn of optimization on certain function and it worked as it should) but still ergh.

[frag.machine]

Indeed. Just for fun I tried to compile Quake 2 source and surprise, VS2008 failed to open the old MSVC6 solution. I managed to scrap the original project and recreate it following some tut on youtube, but definitely it's far from what I would call "fun". Parsing text looks like a breeze in comparison.

[mh]

What's mildly funny is that - if you downloaded the Q2 sources from github - it's probably just a text-parsing problem. Because the files on github have Unix line-endings, which VS 2008 is generally OK with, with the exception of the project files, which it will choke on.

[revelator]

Thought they did away with that ages ago ??? cr/lf endings, msysgit even asks you if you want windows line endings when checking out.
User error can ofc newer be counted out havent had those kind of problems in some while, but i do remember having to run unix2dos on project files in the past.

[mh]

On github if you use the "Download Zip" link:



You'll get Unix line-endings, at least from the id software stuff.

[frag.machine]

Oh well... If the problem is actually related to text encoding, I'd expect some message related, but the error I got didn't give any clue. I'll make some experiments later to check this theory.