Are You Happy With Your Coding Practices?

[WILL]

I ask you... Are you guys happy with your coding practices? Are you really at the top of your game and are happy with all the amount of knowlage you have gained up to this point?

What sorts of things that you do while programming you latest project, game or tool, that you feel needs the most attention or improvement? What are your essential programming needs? ie. What you use most.

What sorts of things do you feel you need to know to better your future creations? Most people are always trying to improve themselves with different things. And if they are not then they are not really into Mastering what they are doing there. Mastery is not for everybody, true. But for those that have this ambition to keep growing in anything or especially programming and computer sciences, I think it is important to know your limitations desires and weak areas so that you may be able to progress with your goals and enjoy the process of programming and creating software in general.

[cairnswm]

A number of years ago I identified for myself what I needed to be able to do to write the games I wanted to (Isometric RTS and RPG games).

Based on this list I narrowed my focus to the point where all I tried to learn about game dev was those items Identified (e.g. No 3D stuff, Only 2D, some networking, Joystick input etc).

I am currently very happy with where my skills are. I can now write the games I want to be able to write (Run-A-War was a major accomplishment for me :D ). There are still things I need to learn - the most important of which is Modelling to make the sprites for my games.

There are some things that I dont feel I do that well :( :
:arrow: My mathematic skill is far too low for what I need.
:arrow: I dont know enough about AI - I only really understand fuzzy logic based rule systems.
:arrow: My modelling skill doesn't exist.
:arrow: My discipline is lacking - I havn't worked on any games for a week now, my last backup was a month ago etc.

[Harry Hunt]

What cairnswm said, really.

I wish I was better at math, especially trigonometry.

I do like my general speed and my software architectural skills though.

[{MSX}]

Well i can say i know enought stuff to know that i know very little (as Socrates used to say).

Apart from jokes, i'm quite happy with my skill. I now know enought of the 3d world to actually make something.. I've trigonometrical skills enought to develop simple 3d algorithms.. Not too much but enought. :)

For the future, i'd like to improve my 3d skills. There are lots of things that i lack deeply..

My interest is now most on engineering, such as code structure (to handle different state, when to perform loading/unloading of things, etc), and modularity.
Expecially for modularity, i think it's one of the most important things.. In particular my points are:
:arrow: a module should do 1 thing and comunicate by well-defined interfaces (not intended as pascal interfaces) with other modules. For example, I spend a lot of time deciding if a method should be private, protected or public.

For example, when you see that a method you need is private, the first impulse is to simply turn it public and go on coding. Instead in this cases i stop myself and i say: why i need this method, if i've previously decided that it was private? Should i review the "well-defined interface of communication"? What's wrong in the end?

:arrow: Modules should have as few dependencies as possible. For example my GUI system is graphics-independet. It really doesn't care what you're using (directx or opengl). Just to say, my GUI unit only includes two other units: Classes and SysUtils :D
The task of drawing a widget is given to another module. This module knows nothing of mouse clicks, callbacks, drag&drop etc. It just draws.

This structure usually require some more code to write but it's definetly worth. Now i have an engine that can be used in many different projects with little modification (my projects, FunkyCars, SpaceCadett and Turn all share a great amount of code).

bye :P