Soffish Developer Diaries I
Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 7:16 pm
I know that these past few months is has seemed like Soffish has simply been forgotten by me: that I have stopped working on Soffish. This however is not the case.
Soffish started out as a very simple program on par with Entity, and it lacked the depth of code to ever be something better. What was released back a few months ago was a code base that borrowed strongly from Xzodia's classes. Most of the work that went into the beta of Soffish was towards the GUI, and not towards the code-base that ran everything.
Therefore I decided that I needed to shift my focus away from the GUI, and towards the real meat and potatoes of Soffish: thus was born SoffishLib. SoffishLib is a code-base programmed almost from the ground up: although some ideas and classes have been evolved from Xzodias original code-base. The focus on this new code-base has been on three major goals: Speed, Efficiency, and Correctness. I have been taking my time on this new code-base because I wanted to avoid the pitfalls that many other have ran into: I did not want to create another sub-par Entity. I have taken my time to code methods to be as fast as possible, given my limited knowledge of programming, while maintaining as small a footprint in memory as I can. The last goal, the goal of correctness, has taken me the longest to realize. I have taken care that while programming I have not taken shortcuts, or made too many assumptions about how the .map structure works. I focus my efforts on making sure that under a wide spectrum of possible outcomes my code will be able to correctly handle any possibilities.
SoffishLib as it stands today is nearing completion of all major functionality, and I will soon be ready to move onto more GUI/Application work based upon the SoffishLib library.
Soffish started out as a very simple program on par with Entity, and it lacked the depth of code to ever be something better. What was released back a few months ago was a code base that borrowed strongly from Xzodia's classes. Most of the work that went into the beta of Soffish was towards the GUI, and not towards the code-base that ran everything.
Therefore I decided that I needed to shift my focus away from the GUI, and towards the real meat and potatoes of Soffish: thus was born SoffishLib. SoffishLib is a code-base programmed almost from the ground up: although some ideas and classes have been evolved from Xzodias original code-base. The focus on this new code-base has been on three major goals: Speed, Efficiency, and Correctness. I have been taking my time on this new code-base because I wanted to avoid the pitfalls that many other have ran into: I did not want to create another sub-par Entity. I have taken my time to code methods to be as fast as possible, given my limited knowledge of programming, while maintaining as small a footprint in memory as I can. The last goal, the goal of correctness, has taken me the longest to realize. I have taken care that while programming I have not taken shortcuts, or made too many assumptions about how the .map structure works. I focus my efforts on making sure that under a wide spectrum of possible outcomes my code will be able to correctly handle any possibilities.
SoffishLib as it stands today is nearing completion of all major functionality, and I will soon be ready to move onto more GUI/Application work based upon the SoffishLib library.