What kinds of roadblocks do YOU encounter?

Not only what kinds, but how often and to what degree?

I'm working very hard on a newish project right now, and trying to build my own engine. I can honestly say that about three fourths of the entire development process has been running into problems, looking through the code to identify the problem, finding it, and rewriting the code to fix it. (The other one fourth is devoted to animating characters, level design, composing music, etc.) Is this bad? or does everyone spend this much time fixing stuff?

I just want to get an idea of what everyone else is dealing with. This is where you get to vent all of your frustrations and problems. =D

That's what most coding consists of! You're unlikely to get everything right the first time, but with experience, you can learn what might be going wrong, where, and the likely ways to fix it.

Well, I did assume a lot of coding is trial and error, but sometimes it's taken me literally days to fix an error I made. I don't know if that's common or if I'm just in over my head.

That can be problem we all face from time to time. You are ok. Even the most experienced coders have this issue come up.

Marv

more often than not, missing features/functionality (sometimes obvious) in either mmf itself or extensions that involve nasty workarounds cause huge problems for me

"nasty" can range from messy/inconvenient (having to use more extensions for just one thing, or a ton of ACEs instead of just one or two) to being essentially impossible to implement (due to major performance hits, instability, or features for the workaround itself not existing)

Well theres always the possibility that you bit off more than you can chew, unfortunately I do that all the time when it comes to programming XD Somehow everything seems to work in the end though :P But hey, it's inevitable to run into problems unless you're re-doing something you've done before( and even then you might still run into a problem or two). The game I'm working on now has just gone through 3 different main engines,(way too much code to stay sane with) each more complicated than the last, and a total re-haul/re-design of almost every single level. That's what happens when you start working on something without discussing it with your teammates first :P The game started looking like something entirely different than we planned so basically it was all scrapped and re-done. Bummer huh?

Anyways, I'm pretty sure we are all in the same boat. Just remember to take a break every now and then to get everything in perspective. Good luck on your game!

I thing bugs are part of programming. If you didn't find any bug in your tests, then you should test better.
Those bugs can be a waste of time, but that's just the way it is. And the worse thing is to leave a bug unnoticed and move to another layer of your code. When the bug will appear it will be far harder to track down. We should test every step we make. Yet I often find myself coding a huge block and crossing my fingers while pressing 'Run' (of course this miserably bugs every time).

Real trouble happens when you had badly planned/designed you app. Then, you run in serious problems, and that's when you'll have to start things over again. This should be prevented by cautious thinking before rushing to the code itself. Taking a pen and paper is probably the best way. I try to do this most of the time. I try to make diagrams of my databases and such...

Hmmm... It's nice to know i'm not alone in all this code re-doing.

Corentin, that's definetely what I've found to be true. Most of my unfinished games are sitting around incomplete because I planned them horribly. Now when I go back and look at them, I have no idea what I was planning because I organised it so badly. Lately, though, I've been trying to do what you said: Planning the game in detail before I start developing the code.

Thanks for all of the reponses so far, guys.

Every game I make I end up with a problem. After a few attempts I end up fixing it. Then again there are those big problems that stump me and make me want to dump the whole project. It is very normal to end up with many problems like this. It is sometimes annoying when you can't find out what the problem is.:sleep:

Personally I believe this is an area MMF can improve a lot. I used to run into dead ends / "having-to-recode-it-all" with MMF a lot, while with regular code (C# or Java) pieces of code are usually final the second or third rewrite, sometimes the first time and only few, central pieces change many times.

This is what I mean by "maintainability" in my rants.. if code is maintainable, you can fix things instead of having to trace back half or all of your progress and going another route from there. I think MMF needs to be more modular and flexible in an object oriented way. Right now everything is just totally entangled, so if you want to fix one larger thing, you have to throw away the whole.

It's sad to hear that some much stuff has to be done over and over again, and good planning and experience can only save you so much.

You're absolutely right Random ! But I can't really think of any real suggestion to improve things in this area...

Most of the time you have to be a veteran to know what could cause problems, this is both logical and pretty sad for new users.

The worse thing I came upon was being blocked because of an extension bug/missing feature/instability.

For me the roadblocks i find are it's missing certain features i was hoping it would have. Mainly audio and graphics things.

Graphics wise a big thing is saving of images. It can save images but not well in the way i was hoping so things like saving a frame thats not the active frame (In focus). Saving with transparency also. This should be standard/default really in the storyboard editor under the frames option. It is mainly 3rd party modules that allows most of this stuff also rather than being included by default. This means it might be a option in a extension somewhere but they are spread out and have you searching around rather than being obvious. The 3rd party extensions usually miss certain features also so it can seem like they might work but then later you find they can't do what you wanted or have some limitation.

Audio wise the lack of simple effects like reverb, filters and delay and midi input/output (i don't mean playing a .mid song btw). Rendering of audio sequences and exporting sounds also which at the moment requires 3rd party extensions and doesn't give great results after testing.

Also various workspace things although not major adjusting a few simple things could help the app a great deal in terms of user friendliness. I have already mentioned a lot of these in a huge ideas/requests thread a while back so hopefully they will get added.

So basically although i really like the app and it can do lots of cool things. It is not quite the multimedia experience i was hoping for as i find it's aimed more at running of media than working with it. It's also more in the direction of game making than apps which rely more on 3rd party modules i find. Since i wanted to mainly make apps it means i should expect less and have to wait for things to be added which may never happen as originally i was expecting it to do too much.

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Originally Posted by Corentin

But I can't really think of any real suggestion to improve things in this area...

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I suggested a lot of things in the past, but I don't think any of that will be done in MMF2 and maybe not even in MMF3 - although I really recommend Clickteam to make MMF more object oriented and allow objects to define and implement interfaces and improve the workflow of writing/using/debugging code that is used over multiple frames. Fixing/supporting these things properly would already have people rewrite much smaller portions of their code (as opposed to EVERYTHING).
Some form of step-through-debugger that allows to follow the code being processed LINE BY LINE as opposed to frame by frame would also help a lot to maintain one's code (as many bugs just come from not quite being able to follow what exactly happens at runtime).
But yeah. The list of things that can lessen the frustration and improve the productivity as almost endless (see Yves wishlist for MMF features :) ) - I just hope Clickteam can get the priorities straight.

Inheritance and globalization of code are two areas that are still relatively weak in MMF at the moment, but Clickteam have a challenge in implementing a lot of the features you mentioned because in principle it's meant to be... not exactly a beginner's tool, but something that's accessible to everyone, and coding concepts like interfaces may be difficult to present in a way that's friendly and accessible to users without background programming knowledge as well as as powerful as (what a sentence) the more advanced MMF users want it to be. At the moment, the mechanics of the qualifiers is close to the idea of interfaces, but there are several things about them that make them less neat to work with. There are many power users who find they need more advanced features in the software, but Clickteam also have to consider the priority of the new users that the tool is meant to introduce to the whole coding concept.

A line-by-line debugger would be fantastic, incidentally.

The line-by-line debugger would indeed be a most useful tool. This and a real if-then-elseif-else system would be enough to make MMF3 worth it.

I find myself spending most of my time with custom movement engine problems. Probably due to my lack of math skills :P

Fortunately there are tutorials but they can only cover so much.

me is the custom platform engine too, but it is just making each engine unique to each character(i have 8 charaters so far each with 3 different sprites at least)(2 are going to have 10 differnt sprites). after i finish that, i gotta design each level so that everyone can pass it, if u choose a certain person( or dont choose) u can do more stuff

Every tool has its limits. I find that little things here and there would make workflow go faster, be less painful... yet, with all my years of coding in VB and C, I still find that I'd much prefer to use MMF2 than go at it without.

I wish that click events, for example, were part of the object being clicked, rather than a mouse object... and I'd love it if you could tab from one field to the next in the properties pane, rather than type, click, then type.

but again, I prefer using MMF2 over game development without it.

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Originally Posted by Corentin

The line-by-line debugger would indeed be a most useful tool. This and a real if-then-elseif-else system would be enough to make MMF3 worth it.

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I agree.

stephen1980