Wed, 26 Aug 2009

Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline

In response to the rhetorical question at the end of the teaser, all I can say is "All the time!". But I'll have to add that it's almost always in compliance with the Iron Law of Software Engineering:

  • On time
  • Quality code
  • Under budget

Guess which two options management always picks...

Gamasutra is running an article with a collection of anecdotes from game developers who had to employ some quick and dirty fixes to get their products to ship on time. Here's a brief excerpt: "Back at [company X] — I think it was near the end of [the project] — we had an object in one of the levels that needed to be hidden. We didn't want to re-export the level and we did not use checksum names. So right smack in the middle of the engine code we had something like the following. The game shipped with this in: if( level == 10 && object == 56 ) {HideObject();} Maybe a year later, an artist using our engine came to us very frustrated about why an object in their level was not showing up after exporting to what resolved to level 10. I wonder why?" Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?

(link) [Slashdot]

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