Trystan/01 20 03

Category rant? Grah! GRAH! Christ. I just feel like beating my head against the wall. The more research and reading I do for the Engine Overview the more I realize how little I fscking know! How the HELL do you people learn all this?! I feel like I know the Gnome API better than I do UnrealScript and I barely know what the heck a widget is! No! Look up one word and get EIGHT THOUSAND HITS back! Worse! They're all relevant! Interactions? What the hell are those? Where'd they come from? (That's a rhetorical question. I've got a grip on them now.) States? How many good UnrealScript programmers are there? How many shoddy ones that are shoddy simply because they don't know the true abilities of this engine? There's not just one way to do something, there's eight BAZILLION. Replication is a fscking joke. The deobfuscation document is a joke. If I ever truly understand replication I plan on writing something better because I just wasn't satisfied with that document. Yes, yes, I know it's terribly complex but come on, if people can teach themselves Calculus we can do better than replication explanations which depend solely on examples! But I'll never get there! I'm going to write this overview and find huge gaping holes in it everywhere! Everywhere! Oy vey! Freaky deeky Dutch! AHHHHHHHHH.. rotators, vectors, emitters, actions, interactions, controllers, players, pawns, bots, ooh bots. Holy Christ. The bot system in UT2K3 is more incestual than a fourth generation family from Arkansas. (My wife's from Arkansas. I can make that joke. I always loved my sister.) Circles, loops, "native magic." And you can't just go investigate one thing because nothing stands on it's own. Even the Win32 API has items that stand on their own. UT2K3 is one of the best OO systems I've seen in commercial production (holy mother of God you should see some of the code I've seen and I'm not that great!) and it's still got crossover. Black box? HA! I laugh at you! Here's a great page! SpawnPoint? Look AT THAT INFO ROLL! WHEE! For fun and loss of sanity hit Random Page a few times at the top. THE WIKI IS HUGE! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH..

And I'm trying to map this thing? And UT2K3? Can someone PLEASE pull this foot out of my mouth?! Because my melted brain is coming out of my ears and I want it to go somewhere else.

What's brown and sticky?

A stick.

EntropicLqd: Has it ever occured to you that maybe .. just maybe .. it only looks like we know what we are talking about?

Tarquin: It's sorta fun reading the above... not in a cruel shadenfreude way. But because it's pretty much how I felt about it a year ago when we set up the Wiki Nice to know I'm not the only lunatic. I'll delete SpawnPoint?. As for the wiki.... yes, it needs a good clean-up. I started trying to simplify tutorial pages by creating the Basic Procedure pages. The topic pages need a spring clean... anyone, feel free to beat me to it.

Trystan: I'm okay now. I think. Heh.

capt.k: The bot system IS a mess – particularly the XGame stuff – so amazingly, needlessly, convoluted. I'd like to try some of the crack they were smoking when they wrote that stuff.

El Muerte TDS: Capt.K let me see you code and I will tell you where you started smoking. You will always begin very writing very clean code, creating nice subclasses and creating nice extendable code. But after a while you will start getting sloppy and create ugly code. The uwiki is the same, it started very nice but when it grew it started to get out of shape.

Mychaeel: It requires some discipline to keep code clean and well-designed, but it is possible. It would be for the Unreal Wiki too if not everybody expected somebody else to clean up something. – For that matter, I don't believe UT2003's bot support architecture is "needlessly convoluted" or "a mess" at all. I found it much easier to implement medium- to high-level bot support in UT2003 than it was in Unreal Tournament that basically provided nothing except a few hooks in DeathMatchPlus.

Foxpaw: I'd have to agree with most of that. However, I don't think replication is that bad. I've heard it's complex, but I actually find it fairly intuitive with the exception of some things getting replicated only if they are owned by the player to whom replication is being considered. That part I can't stand.. Darnit! I'll decide when it get's replicated or not! Arr! I agree completely on bots though.. it's sheer wierdness. I wrote a rant about this specifically directed toward pawns.. you'd think that the bots could just mimic keypresses and thus use the same interface to the pawn like one would expect from a modular system, but they had other ideas. I don't think that the wiki is overly filled with stuff though, except some pages I've seen spring up lately that are of questionable relevance.

PS: If you have difficulty understanding replication from the replication document I wrote on the Replication page, I'd be glad to rewrite portions of it that weren't clear.