Oblivious Sponge

After using C++ in anger for about four years I’m constantly troubled by coding inertia - when you know you should create a new class/factor out a base class/extract a method - but it’s just a little bit too much effort. Especially when combined with CVS and multiple Visual Studio 6 workspaces/projects. Yagh!

So? Well, C#, Visual Studio 2003 and Subversion working together almost gets rid of this inertia. The only problem remaining seems to be me. I still put off (or at least overestimate and dread) what end up as simple, mechanical refactorings.

The motivation for this upbeatness is that I just managed to rip out the hardcoded particle generation and force application from my particles engine and add fountains that move in the wind in about 10 minutes.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I’ll get them reacting sensibly to some implicit surfaces (well, some kind of floor, to be precise). Oh, and they look better moving. Honest!

I’m quite happy with Visual Studio 2003 (I’ll be even happier with 2005, judging by the beta). I’m determined to use it for as much coding as possible - something I never managed in Visual Studio 6.

Anyway, I’ve semi-happily got it working with F# (an OCaml under the CLR, for those who care. A lengthy post may eventually appear on this subject). Tonight I’ve started using Lua again and have got into a reasonable state of editing/running code in Visual Studio. I downloaded lualite and added lua.exe as an external tool in VS with $(ItemFileName)$(ItemExt) as arguments and $(ItemDir) as the initial directory.

There’s probably a better way of getting it to play nice with project configurations and the like, but this will more than suffice for now.

As for justification for Lua? Well DaveT (a wise work colleague) has a crazy idea That Might Just Work about Lua and DS development. I’ve currently got plans of a yielding PacMan. Don’t ask.