Am I missing something?

[blackgauntlet]

Jan 30, 2012 10:18:45 GMT -5 bigboote66 said:

It makes me feel like my character in the game is something of a dolt, stupidly sailing on while his crew is screaming at him, or cluelessly violating one of the many political rules that are constantly changing. Yeah, I know that some of the officers help out in this regard, but that just reinforces that the Captain is some Will Farrel-like man-child who needs people around him to tell him when his pants are on fire. Maybe that's part of the fun?

Whoa, that mental image actually refreshes the way I look at my Captains!

All along, I thought they were cool-looking decorated soldier/fringer types who will point their fingers at the players for being the stupid ones when they die.

[Cory Trese]

God I love it when things are simplified down to statements like this one:

"something you could implement with a circular linked list, ring buffer, or even just simple array"

I honest can't tell now if you are trolling or just think I'm an idiot.

[Cory Trese]

PS: No more replies from me until we have clarified the above. it is important for context and determines how seriously I take this thread going forward.

[blackgauntlet]

Er... Did I post something that looks like I was trolling? Sorry If I did.

Don't remember using those techno-mumbo-jumbo terms though.

[Cory Trese]

I was probably overreacting.

I have a special dislike for suggestions along the line of "just use a simple X" when it comes to software engineering issues in serious projects.

In a professional environment this type of question usually comes from new or inexperienced team members.

I have a bit of a rule of thumb for this -- you can spot a seasoned engineer (not just one with senior in his or her title) from the questions they ask. Instead of "have you tried a simple array?" they ask "what complexities drive the current requirements?"

In almost every complex software system (there are some exceptions, sure, scientifically there always are) there are root cause reasons for the complexity. They may be obtuse, hidden or obscure but they exist. By nature, humans are lazy creatures and will find a simple path if one exists.

[blackgauntlet]

Hahaha! Pet peeves, eh? Watch out, Cory! I'll be starting a running gag...

Have you tried using duct tape? ;D

[ab357]

I'm secretly a seasoned engineer. My skills are so advanced, I can use my two thumbs or one middle finger and flick from home screen to home screen until I get to the ST app. Because of my superior academic and field experience, I can just tap the ST app and I'm suddenly in space.

I know... that shows a lot of edumacation on my part. However if you're willing to spend the big bucks and put in years of training. You too can become just as good of an engineer as me.

[blackgauntlet]

I'll 1-up you by using no-hands. I just let my kid play it for me (read: snatched from me). ;D

[bigboote66]

Jan 31, 2012 0:15:25 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

I was probably overreacting.

I have a special dislike for suggestions along the line of "just use a simple X" when it comes to software engineering issues in serious projects.

In a professional environment this type of question usually comes from new or inexperienced team members.

I have a bit of a rule of thumb for this -- you can spot a seasoned engineer (not just one with senior in his or her title) from the questions they ask. Instead of "have you tried a simple array?" they ask "what complexities drive the current requirements?"

Sorry you took offense. I really have no idea what your capabilities are, and I got the feeling that you weren't particularly interested in a detailed design discussion, as you seemed to imply that the project is basically done from feature/usability standpoint, and I didn't want to waste your time any more than I already have. I also understand that this is a very personal project for you, and it's easy to get annoyed at others when it comes to your "baby". The fact that you're even bothering to have this conversation with me is more than I would expect.

As for what constitutes seasoned questions - I've been professionally developing software for over 20 years, and question like "why don't you use data structure X" is often the quickest way to get crux of why requirements dictate certain decisions.

I've done no development in managed-code sandboxes like Android, but I am aware that options that seem simple and obvious in C/C++ on unix are impractical on other platforms. However, I was at a loss how a simple message log could run into memory problems on any platform. Given the nature of our relationship (anonymous, n00b customer to developer), I felt it presumptuous to get into a core requirements discussion with you.

That said, based on your upset response and my original confusion as to how the feature was so difficult for you, I can only think that you scoped it much broader than I had -- which was why I mentioned that even a simple data structure that was not persistent across executions, or only kept track of the last few dozen messages. Despite my ignorance in Android development, I can't believe that such a modest requirement would be difficult on any platform.

But, really, I don't mean to waste your time. I don't want to put you in a place to just defend yourself from the cries of the peanut gallery - that won't be a good use of your time or mine, and will likely be boring for everyone else. However, if you feel like continuing this conversation from even just an academic or navel gazing standpoint (with no expectation from me that you'll implement any of it), I'm fine with that as well.

[blackgauntlet]

Feb 1, 2012 12:10:42 GMT -5 bigboote66 said:

However, if you feel like continuing this conversation from even just an academic or navel gazing standpoint (with no expectation from me that you'll implement any of it), I'm fine with that as well.

I was lost on everything you said until you said "navel gazing"...

[Cory Trese]

I do apologize, I reacted poorly. Some of my frustration (which is unfair) comes from some of the repetitive nature of the discussions, especially around things which I am unable / not staffed to fix.

Toast notifications across threads and outside of the UI context are a great example.

The Toast (asynchronous screen notification FIFO queue) system is hosted in an OS service and can be utilized from a wide array of different Android component and thread types.

Because of this, it is very easy to build simulation and data processing components that come to rely on the Toast service for data exchange with the user.

Certain advantages have been gained from the state of the processing logic which would be shed if the application's UI was required to communicate with the processing logic.

Therefore, in some ways, ST RPG is "addicted" to the toasts because if they were removed a large set of user-favorite features would be culled / greatly reduced.

In future games I have built simpler systems which can be linked into the UI. There are compromises on both sides but in the end, CK and TA don't use the same type of simulators as ST.

[Cory Trese]

And I have tried, several times, to come up with clever solutions that works across all our devices. I have tried 3 different combinations of concurrent buffers, shared memory, persistent data structures, static instance registers ... none of them have satisfied the requirements and passed device and performance testing.

This is one advantage of the Toast service -- it is really a very tough little piece of code and you and really abuse it and it won't crash

[blackgauntlet]

Okay, all's well that ends well.

Let's celebrate by staring at a cute Asian chick showing off her pussy.

[bigboote66]

Feb 1, 2012 22:41:48 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Certain advantages have been gained from the state of the processing logic which would be shed if the application's UI was required to communicate with the processing logic.

Therefore, in some ways, ST RPG is "addicted" to the toasts because if they were removed a large set of user-favorite features would be culled / greatly reduced.

Understood about the back-propagation from the UI features to your back-end code. But why not just create a wrapper function around the call to publish toasts, which in turn logs the message to be toasted to a mutex-protected ring buffer?

[Cory Trese]

yeah, tried, didn't work