Every game I have ever worked on has had crunch or overruns or both. So here I thought I'd document why. This isn't a philosophical piece or a dig at producers. This is just a list of the reasons that actually caused crunch or overrun. I've had 17 good years out of the games industry and I hope to have many many more. Planning is critical, but it isn't a silver bullet. Here, in no particular order, are the reasons: 1. Breaking down the task ahead is tough. No matter how thoroughly you try, and no matter how much you sit in front of Project thinking, you will ALWAYS mis-estimate the job ahead. Main reason for me personally is that I'm normally asked to project tasks for a deliverable I've not done before, from a codebase I'm not fully knowledgeable about. 2. It's hard to visualise the current state of the project. Even with encyclopaedic knowledge of the code (which is impossible these days) there are hidden corners of technical debt and malfunctions ...
I've started looking at Rust again. I had a quick try of rust about 18 months ago when I was looking at modern alternatives to C++. At that time I learned a bit of Rust and also some Go. Both languages impressed me but to be honest I liked the feel of Go more... mainly because it was simpler to learn. Time has passed and my mind has wondered back to Rust. This page is a scrap book of thoughts about Rust during my first week back. Things I like about Rust... Built-in a build system (cargo) Immutable by default Explicit data ownership semantics Built-in documentation about the language and compiler errors Sensible type inference External module dependency versioning makes sense No implicit bool conversion Descriptive error reporting Tuples ! Things I'm not sure about... note I'm not saying these things are bad... just that I'm unconvinced at this point Allowing variable type changes via shadowing Progress reading 'The Rust Book' - 6.1 Definin...
Aah, here I am again... trying to kick-start this blog into shape. The plan of course is to write in here more often and actually include some stuff that I'm doing or mooching about with. So here goes... again... My latest hobby stuff is writing a stochastic path tracer, which is a kind of ray tracer. It 's all the fault of Peter Shirley and his ' Ray Tracing in A Weekend ' books on Kindle, which are a decent little kick-start into the topic. My weapon of choice for doing my own version of a path tracer is Qt on Linux... which should give a lot of options for platform and capabilities. It's going OK so far - in the limited time I give it - but I'm still partial to over-engineering various non-critical parts of the code. Although I'm aware of it at least this time, I'm still letting myself do a bit of faffing, just because why not... it's all good practice writing code I've not necessarily done before in any sort of anger. The upshot of the ...
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