old code, new code

[Laser]

A very nicely written article from 2000, which seems relevant to the old engine <-> new engine discussion (should programmers rewrite everything from scratch or not)

 

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

 

 

[79_vRAF_Friendly_flyer]

Nice article, thanks!

[Laser]

you're welcome  i liked how he shows what emphasis people put on "new code", as if old code rusts just by sitting there 

[Skoshi_Tiger]

Old code doesn't rust but it can become obsolete.

 

Code is written and optimized to run on a particular computer architecture. As that architecture changes, the algorithms that you would use, especially in a program that needs to be performance driven like a flight sim, to get the most of that architecture may change.

 

I guess if a customers purchases and new computer to run a flight sim on would like it to run as efficiently as possible on their new computer.

 

Luckily for BoS the Digital Nature Engine is fairly new and has been written, optimized and updated to run on our modern computers. It already uses multithreading to take advantage of multiple cores.

 

At some stage it will probably make sense for the developers to move to a newer version of DirectX. That may or may not require a lot of code from the Digital Nature engine to be re-written. That problem and the issues it will raise (thankfully) belongs to the developers.

[Laser]

Sure, and i agree. Beyond that, the article underlines that it's not so much code that becomes obsolete with time, compared to the perception of it (a quite large part of a sim, for example, is the campaign system logic, which shouldn't become obsolete so fast ...), and also that even 'old code' stores inside a lot of experience which can be independent of the sound/graphic/etc. libraries used at the time. I remember some years ago a friend who followed Mozilla's browser development (on their bug tracker). At one point, he was amazed at the fact that after Firefox changed it's major version number (implying code was rewritten, new redesign of the browser etc.), a lot of OLD bugs reappeared again, the same bugs which were already solved once, in a previous major version ... 

 

So of course you are right, what i like about the article is how it makes a fine point of showing how "stored experience" is thrown away with old code, for the same logical errors to be made again, on another platforms/APIs/libraries. Not every day is there a paradigm shift 

[Skoshi_Tiger]

Yes it is a good point!