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Re: AI is a pushover & UI
Berry Kercheval wrote:
bboett@bboett.dyndns.org said:
tcl/tk is an incredible messy thing, and very soons becomes un
debuggable and unreadable,
I mostly lurk here, but I can't let this pass. Whatever reasons there are
for switching to SDL, Tcl/Tk is not ipso facto messy. I've worked on projects
with hundreds of thousands of lines of Tcl/Tk and they were well structured,
readable and debuggable. Good software engineering discipline means you can
write good code anywhere, but you can write messy, undebuggable unreadable
code in any language. Please don't blame the language for the faults of the
coders.
(And I'm not saying that the xconq Tcl interface is messy, either. I've not
examined it carefully; I just love to play the game.)
The tcl code in the Xconq interface is pretty straightforward (at least
if you grok tcl :-) ), but where it gets complicated is with the custom
widgets. Map graphics is complicated to begin with, and it's even harder
when you have to add in all the tcl widget rules. It would be a big win
if you had to do something funky like create a dialog with a 4x3 grid
of little map widgets, but it's overkill for what most game players want
out of the UI.
(The evolution of computer game interfaces is quite interesting, since
the overall trend has been towards a sort of game-specific virtual
reality UI rather than the supposed nirvana of multiple overlapping
windows using generic window management machinery.)
Stan