Transportation, Abandoning Project

Posted by polyfrag, 26 November 2012 · 578 views

I've got trucks transporting now. But I'm abandoning the project now. So this journal is no longer solely about this project.

There's too many problems with the project. It gets laggy for one thing, and I don't know why. Also I'm not sure if the economy will work without failing and it would take too long to check. Also, there's still odds and ends that I have to finish like trucks transporting resources to unfinished roads and powerlines when global resources run out. Also, adding the pipeline models. And there's the issue of how much consumer goods and/or production should be in reserve for consumption by labourers or use by the player. And most of the price controls are useless without an extra player but it's too difficult for me to make one at this point and it might increase the lag.

So here's the last release: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/109630018/CorpStates.zip

Black-Rook

Nov 26 2012 03:07 AM

I tried to run the program a few times, but it's way too slow. I wouldn't give up on your project that easily! The FPS drop could be caused from a lot of things. Were past builds this slow?

polyfrag

Nov 26 2012 03:34 AM

It's probably because I have a 2.60 GHz Intel Core i7 that I don't notice the lag.

I wouldn't give up on your project that easily!

I dread working on this project now. It's so painful. I want to move on to funner iOS and Android development.

Black-Rook

Nov 26 2012 07:30 AM

Well I'm using an Intel i5 661 - 3.33ghz cpu, still slow.

Either way, look forward to seeing your next project. Posted Image

riuthamus

Nov 26 2012 07:41 AM

Sorry to hear, what you were working on looking promising.

Ashaman73

Nov 26 2012 07:42 AM

It's probably because I have a 2.60 GHz Intel Core i7 that I don't notice the lag.

Quote

I wouldn't give up on your project that easily!

I dread working on this project now. It's so painful. I want to move on to funner iOS and Android development.

When abandoning a project, just ensure to not give up completely and to transfer the greatest benefit of it to your next project: experience

I followed your project for some time now and my impression was, that you don't have a lot of experiences yet, relying too much on tutorials etc., later on you seemed to get hold on your project and make some progress. Though after some time your early sins seemed to fire back leaving a project no longer manageable.

Best to utilize the art for your next project. Learn from your misstakes (take an existing engine instead of writing your own etc.) and start again.

My biggest fail was my second or third project, where I coded a good running iso-game in asm in just a single file (!), ~60000 lines of code with no more than 4 letter labels

After summer break I wanted to track down a bug, but the code was unmanagable and I abandoned it and moved on. After that I learned to be more patient, do more planing, work on clearer code structure and to use atleast two files ;-)

JTippetts

Nov 27 2012 10:45 AM

Heh, Ashaman73, A similar story happened to me with my old Golem project. It was actually a continuation of a project I started in, oh, somewhere around 1997. I picked up this old project, gave myself a couple weeks to re-acquaint myself with it, and proceeded to create the most remarkable plate of spaghetti I've ever seen. It was playable, and relatively bug free, and even looked pretty good, but sweet hell was it hard to make any further progress. I keep it around just for laughs (at least as much of it as I have been able to find on old hard drives).

But sometimes, abandoning a project is the only way to save the kernel of the idea upon which the project is based.

jbadams

Nov 27 2012 09:58 PM

Sad to see you put this aside, but hopefully you can put all the knowledge you've gained to good use on your future endeavours and produce some great games!

If you've got the time and inclination to do so I'm sure people would be interested in a post-mortem looking at what went well, what problems you encountered, and what you feel eventually lead to the stage of abandoning the project -- detailing the experience might help to clarify some of the lessons to be learned in your own mind as well!

Looking forward to seeing what you tackle next, and best of luck with it!

polyfrag

Nov 28 2012 08:59 AM

It's not completely dead because I reserve the right to go back and try to fix it.