Fantômas (French pronunciation: [fɑ̃tomas]) is a fictional character created by French writers Marcel Allain (1885–1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874–1914).

One of the most popular characters in the history of French crime fiction, Fantômas was created in 1911 and appeared in a total of 32 volumes written by the two collaborators, then a subsequent 11 volumes written by Allain alone after Souvestre’s death. The character was also the basis of various film, television, and comic book adaptations. In the history of crime fiction, he represents a transition from Gothic novel villains of the 19th century to modern-day serial killers.

The books and movies that came out in quick succession anticipate current production methods of Hollywood, in two respects:[1] First, the authors distributed the writing among themselves; their “working method was to draw up the general plot between them and then go off and write alternate chapters independently of each other, meeting up to tie the two halves of the story together in the final chapter.” This approach allowed the authors to produce almost one novel per month. Second, the movie rights to the books were immediately snapped up. Such a system ensured that the film studio could produce sequels reliably.

The novels were spoken at the same time in different rooms and recorded on wax cylinders which then were evaluated by two groups of stenographers. Only with this method it was possible to fulfill the quota of one book each month. In preliminary talks both Souvestre and Allain allotted the chapters that had to be written. Because of the time pressure both authors usually did not read the other author’s chapters and sometimes even didn’t proofread their own works.”

wikipedia
wikipedia (emphasis added)

Modern software production is not much different. It is interesting to learn that source version control systems / project management systems have a long history, way before computers even existed.

Whenever you are in the situation of having the choice to rush to a working milestone or put some extra-effort into ‘doing it right’ take a moment to think. Sure, there are deadlines, but there is also the deadline after the deadline. Putting all your effort in reaching an early first deadline will earn you some extra-cash, but the same cash you have to reinvest to re-structure and re-build your code. Next time when you are in the situation of planning a new milestone try to insert some extra time for ‘doing it right’. If you are the manager get your team motivated by giving them a week for cleaning up the code. It will help future releases, make the programming experience for your workers more enjoyable and maybe even find a bug or two.
Grow organically!

Myself I’ve just decided to properly implement the whole layout thing which is essential to any user interface once it reaches a certain complexity. When you have to deal with multiple objects on the screen and maybe even multiple resolutions you have to have a layout class which updates the positions and sizes of the windows accordingly. Hard coding the positions in your database (or even code) is a swift solution but it will bite you the first time you want to ‘also support his other system’. Especially in the time of the web and mobile devices you have to be very flexible. “Hey, let’s port this to our mobile phone, how long will it take? A day or two? You *just* have to change those widths and heights…”

In the last weeks I have completed the sound integration (music and sound effects, marvelous!) and completed the basic GUI including internationalization (german and english for now). Buttons are already working, here and there are still some issues with transparent graphic objects but all in all my main task is now to design the interface, especially to assign proper coloring to all GUI objects. I also have to write an editor sooner or later, editing XML files by hand becomes difficult when you are dealing with inter-related tables… Let’s hope I can finish these things quickly so that I can get to re-implementing the evolutionary algorithms. According to my plans this should start in July. My current status:

• Audio

– FMOD/SDL_mixer support

• Build

– Evolutionary algorithms, processing of the building queue

• Core

– Rules, Units, Locations etc.

• Games

– Game Rules (finished for StarCraft)

• Geometry

– Coordinates, distances, Rectangles, math

• Goal

– logic to handle user defined goals, finished but needs some testing

• Gui

– Logic for GUI elements (window, buttons etc.)

• GuiCore

– Data elements describing gui objects (colors, size, animations, bitmaps etc.)

• Lang

– Internationalization, dynamic text elements, parameters

• Main

– Startup code, main configuration

• SDL

– Drawing, refreshing screen, calculation of parts of the screen to update

• Simulator

– Main simulator program, executes the game rules and the building queues for all players

• UI

– Need to be refactored to new architecture

All in all ~50k lines of code (2,5mb) and about 0,5mb XML files. Looks good!

With my job applications finished I have now some time for a new project. I decided to write down what I have learned about GUI programming and design. This gives me also the opportunity to reflect on my current knowledge and find some hidden errors or anomalies in the code. The structure is already clear, I only have to fill in the words

A very interesting paper about the parallels of the philosophy of Objectivism and Object Orientated Programming (OOP):
Object-Oriented Programming
and Objectivist Epistemology:
Parallels and Implications

Recommended if you are a programmer with some interest in logic and philosophy

Today I’ve finished the primary works on the SDL library and resource management. It’s faster, better structured and more easy to add and manage resources (text, coordinates, colors, bitmaps, videos etc.). Now I’m working on the next layer, the gui elements. Goal is to make it as program-independant as possible by moving all program-dependant data up in the next layer.
Templates, callbacks, design-patterns, resource management, garbage collection, all that becomes relevant the larger the program gets End of the month I expect to breach the 50,000 LOC barrier for the whole project, then I’ll have to research the SC2 beta version (if it ever comes out…) and create a first prototype of EF 2.0. Stay tuned!