RE: [GD-General] Architecture Design

[Warrick B. <War...@po...>]

There always seems to have been two factions in the programming world: those
who understand intimately what they are doing and can write almost what they
want off the mark, and those who need to sit down and think about it a lot
longer before they can write even a comment.

I'm currently suffering in a situation caused by the former and at my last
job suffered from the latter (And ones before that suffered from people not
having a clue ;).  It seems no one has ever managed to find the happy medium
for any project - it's either over designed or no design.  It's particularly
interesting when the two factions meet in heated debate as one side sees the
other as idiots because they can't visualise code in their head and the
other side sees imbeciles who obviously can't write software.

I admit that I verge on the under designed side of things - partly because I
know things will have to be changed with respect to any initial design -
especially when a team of people is involved.  Ideally I'd love to have
design documents that would be used as guidelines rather than bibles.
Currently I tend to have one none formal overview of the 'current'
architecture with a summary of how it's intended to work that's always handy
for meetings - other documentation and design will generally be produced
anyway by people as it is needed for their own benefit or as recognised by
the team (These notes can later be consolidated into 'official'
documentation).  It's all too easy for some people to spend all their time
'designing' rather than writing code!

Of course when a projects finished it's definitely worth documenting more
thoroughly (Generally during the final testing phases) in case you ever want
to reuse(!) your project!

Wow that was longer than intended!  I'm just glad no one got me started on
hungarian notation and people who comment every line of code....

My 2 pennies worth anyway ;)

Warrick.


-----Original Message-----
From: Erwin de Vries [mailto:er...@vo...]
Sent: 08 October 2001 11:50
To: gam...@li...
Subject: Re: [GD-General] Architecture Design


I've never heard of this as well. I know the drill, but its simply not worth
it in most cases. For some cases it might be, but generally there is no need
for formal diagrams in those cases. (IMO)

Erwin

(ARGH! Damn reply issues!)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jamie Fowlston" <ja...@qu...>
To: <gam...@li...>
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 12:14
Subject: RE: [GD-General] Architecture Design


> People design code? :)
>
> Sorry, in my experience, there's some division of tasks (someone writes
> renderer, physics, whatever), then it gets glued together. Very little
> design work....
>
> Jamie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gam...@li...
> [mailto:gam...@li...]On Behalf Of
> Parveen Kaler
> Sent: 07 October 2001 23:10
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: [GD-General] Architecture Design
>
>
> Just a little bit of a survey.  After the gameplay and story of a game has
> been somewhat fleshed out, what kind of techniques do you guys use to
> design the code?  I'm assuming everyone uses diagrams such as ORDs, ERDs,
> and DFDs or some variant.  Is this true?  How detailed do you guys get?
>
> Does anyone get hardcore and actually use UML and tools like Rational
> Rose?  Are there people out there who have worked on both game projects
and
> common desktop applications?  How did the design techniques differ, if at
> all?
>
> Parveen
>
>
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