Probably Dance

I’ve been working on a library that allows you to treat functions as first class objects in C++. Meaning you can assign to a function. Here’s a download link, and here’s a very simple example:

#include "fcf.h"
void foo()
{
    std::cout << "foo\n";
}
void bar()
{
    std::cout << "bar\n";
}
void main()
{
    foo(); // prints "foo"
    auto oldFoo = fcf::function(&foo);
    FCF_ASSIGN(&foo, &bar);
    foo(); // prints "bar"
    FCF_ASSIGN(&foo, oldFoo);
    foo(); // prints "foo"
}

If you have ever worked in a language with first class functions, you’ll know that you can do some quite cool stuff with this.

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I’m almost done with DigiPen. Time to write down some learned lessons. I was only at DigiPen for two years, so others could probably write this better, but until they do there is this post. In both years I was in the most successful game team of the Master’s program, which is my claim to being qualified to write this post. So here are a couple rules, starting with

1. Gameplay first

This is the first point on Blizzard’s mission statement, and they mean “prioritize gameplay.” Do that. But for student games I consider it even more important to interpret that as “work on gameplay first.” The biggest mistake I have seen on student games is wasting time on features that don’t improve gameplay in the end. You do not have time for a student game.

Now how do you finish gameplay first?  Obviously you need tech to do your gameplay. If you want to make a physics-based puzzle platformer, someone has to implement your physics. But I would consider it a mistake to work on the physics until you know that it will result in good gameplay. Which is a problem.

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I recently came across this article about 10 papers every programmer should read. Now I don’t necessarily agree with all of that list, but here is the important part: I am about to finish a Master’s degree in computer science, and I have never heard of any of those papers before.

That is a list of papers which are sometimes more than 40 years old. Some of these gave us the assumptions that are normal for us to make about programming these days. I learned programming in the past ten years, and I had to rediscover some of this knowledge myself. I have made mistakes in programming that should never have been made, because people had solved those problems years ago. And I still see people make those same mistakes that I’m now smugly smarter about.

So what is there to do about it?

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I was going to write a blog post about how to avoid a specific problem, until I realized that I should probably outline the problem first. I call this expensive cheap code, and I realize that the name is not a good name. It comes from buying the cheap version of something expensive.

When you buy something expensive, you do not want to get the cheap version. Because the cheap version will work, it just won’t work well. For example if you buy a big screen TV, but go for the cheap version, you may end up with a bad image quality that nags you every time that the colors are wrong. Or the image is stretched and you can’t unstretch without ruining all other channels. The right thing to do would be to get a new TV and get rid of the old one, but you don’t want to do that because even though it was the cheap model, it was still pretty expensive. And after all it only has small problems.

This is even more frustrating if you buy tools at the hardware shop. Since you probably don’t use your tools all that often, you will be frustrated for years with something that works, but doesn’t work well. And you don’t want to throw it away, because it works after all, and you don’t use it all that often.

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C++ has very little protections against side effects in programming. You’ve got const and that’s about it. And const doesn’t survive through pointers so there’s nothing to stop you from modifying other objects as you please. I like things that stop you from making mistakes. So I thought about how to introduce more things that would make it more difficult to have side-effects in your programming.

I’ve found that you can reduce the side effects in your code by being careful about which pieces of code get dt, and by making all globals const, so that you have to manually pass non-const refs around and make them conscious decisions.

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