Hi Corry and all,
Letting the end user remap the mouse, keyboard, change all kinds of game
settings might be nice, but it isn't realistically feasible from a
programming point of view. What many non-developers fail to recognize is
that there are some very strict guidelines professional developers try
to follow when developing software. These guidelines are there to
hopefully produce a better product.
First, keep the design simple. Keeping the code and over all design as
simple as possible makes it easier to maintain the program, perform
upgrades, fix bugs, and prevent bugs in the program. Adding lots of user
choices and options only complicates the program and makes testing,
debugging, and maintaining the program more difficult in the long run.
That is one reason why I don't include a lot of end user options.
Second, use only as many system resources as absolutely necessary. Even
in todays computing environment where we have plenty of processor power,
memory, and faster disk drives, etc it is no excuse to waist system
resources unnecessarily. Cutting down the amount of memory, processor
power, etc required by the application will in turn result in a faster,
lighter, smoother running application. When a developer adds all kinds
of user options all that ends up doing is waisting more memory and cuts
down on over all program execution time. Even if it is a few KB of
memory and a few milliseconds of time it is still a bad habit to get
into, and is a poorly designed program.
AS it happens Beta 5 is fairly resource intensive right now, and I am
trying to work on the engine to cut down the amount of resources it
uses. On systems with lots of speed and memory the system resources
aren't that bad. However, I've tried it on a couple of older machines
here and the game constantly crashes with memory errors. It seams
anything less than 512 MB of ram won't cut it for this game right now,
and I want to fix that if I can. Make the game use less memory,
processor power, and run smoother on both older and newer systems. If I
were to add all kinds of user options such as personal configurations
for the mouse I will no doubt increase the memory and speed problems
instead of resolve them. So I am reluctant to add too many end user
settings and configurations.
Smile.
Cory Kadlik wrote:
think we should be able to choose
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