[quote][i]I've had a tough couple of days coding... It's just been one of those times were you run into a wall and get discouraged. Partly because of difficulties in keeping the code within their well-defined boundries and keeping them from becoming inter-dependant on one another when I don't have a clear plan for how things will be written.[/i][/quote]

I hear you - it's a bit of the same story for me this week, determining where the functional boundries of new server systems are and working within them.

[quote]It's not even a game yet! How much time have I wasted on it so far?", but on the other hand, I have alot of code written, and I feel confident that it will support the game on top of it.[/quote]

Oh.... don't worry about that. I've written over 400k lines of code creating Toi/Antilia...

I think you're still well within "[i]reasonable effort[/i]".

You do what you have to do.... Keep at it. [img]http://public.gamedev.net//public/style_emoticons/default/smile.png[/img]

Thanks for the encouragement. It's funny that I can look at my code one day, and feel on top of the world, and look at the same code a day later and feel the weight of the world.

"I've had a tough couple of days coding... It's just been one of those times were you run into a wall and get discouraged. Partly because of difficulties in keeping the code within their well-defined boundries and keeping them from becoming inter-dependant on one another when I don't have a clear plan for how things will be written.
Class and function-level code design is easy, but overall arcitecture level is harder for me. I guess that's the important difference between a software arcitect and a code monkey. =D"

Tell me about it. That's my exact problem too.

I can waste hours, days, even weeks on architectural problems. The trick IMO is to not do that. So I allow the odd boundary violation rather than spend ages thinking on a possibly unobtainable architecture (not all problems have solutions). I am fine with an 80% perfect architecture. I might improve it later, I probably won't. I just find a way to live with it. In terms of justifications I tell myself it's good to be more relaxed if you are working on an internal project anyway, otherwise you are missing out on a very big advantage of not working in a team!

In my opinion half the by-the-book stuff on code design is a waste of time for internal projects anyway. For example Notch recently said:
"I still stubbornly believe the whole “private members accessed via accessors” thing in java is bullcrap for internal projects. It adds piles of useless boilerplate code for absolutely no gain when you can just right click a field and chose “add setter/getter” if you NEED an accessor in the future."
[url="http://notch.tumblr.com/post/15782716917/coding-skill-and-the-decline-of-stagnation"]http://notch.tumblr.com/post/15782716917/coding-skill-and-the-decline-of-stagnation[/url]

And he's right. So why am I still writing accessors? Ah....I dunno. I like them I guess. An exception to the exception to the rule.

One rule I violate, although not architectural, is putting an underscore before every private member variable name. A year ago I was venomously opposed to doing that. Why? Because the C# guidelines said don't do it. But since then I've changed my mind (due to being forced to use underscore prefixes at work) because I find it very useful to be able to distinguish local variables in function bodies from private member variables.

Yea, I'm kinda addicted to unnecessary accessors as well.
I use underscores for private member functions in C++, and prefix things with the 'this->' keyword for private members (unless a struct or struct-like class, everything is a private member... just by force of habit). I suppose one charactor, '_' is better than six 'this->', but I don't find it much a nuisance.

Looking good!