Zombie, PFile and the like

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Jan, some days ago, thinking about this and that, that statement of yours
about networking not being one of the sexy parts of game coding came to my
mind again. And, well, that description also perfectly fits for file
handling. That means Zombie and PenguinFile are very much alike in that
respect. And the other things I plan to do later, PenguinConfig and
PenguinGUI, also fit in there.
That means I will get relatively little feedback on almost all the code I
will do in the next years. And people won't know me for it.
So why do I continue?


(1) It's fun. I greatly enjoy building PenguinFile and am looking forward
to PConfig etc.


(2) Those things might not be sexy, but they're important nevertheless.
They don't contribute (much) to the first impression of a game, but using
them or not often decides on whether the game feels robust or shoddy.

You know, there's some (well, quite some) games that look great at first,
but when played for some time you notice tons of little annoying things -
the scrollbar that doesn't support key repeat, the TCP/IP connection that
only works when IPX support is disabled in the OS (and vice versa) etc.

And then theres a few games that simply work as expected, that are just
nice to use and that actually handle that weird situation gracefully. The
games where you clearly see that the developers spent quite a bit of their
time on those unsexy things, that they actually cared about those little
bits that go unnoticed all too often.

That's my motivation. I want to do things properly. I want to make the best
such system around.

I guess when PFile is ready I'll take one of the free games around,
modify it to use PenguinFile and write a short article about that - how
easy the change was and how the game benefits from it.
I *know* we do The Right Thing (TM), we just have to convince the rest of
the world ;)


	Christian

PS: Writing unsexy stuff has one big advantage: you have very little
competition ;+)

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