What kinds of roadblocks do YOU encounter?

[Docilemouse]

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

[DavidN]

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.

[Docilemouse]

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.

[nivram]

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

[xyzzy]

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)

[camelman]

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 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!

[Corentin]

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...

[Docilemouse]

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.

[Rockdude]

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:

[Random]

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.