Development Blah: Comments

[Hawkins]

Interesting feature indeed. It's being seen on other shooter games too. It is rather a matter of taste, if not personal opinion that it breaks game's physics and to that extend, game-play as well. But, it truly is an option after all so...

[karx11erx]

It doesn't break physics, because everything is speeded up. And for a huge map like ACAT (which actually has D3 proportions, and here the ships are significantly faster than in D2, so maps and spaces need to be bigger) it should work nicely. And then you have quite a fine step width to adjust speed.

[Alter-Fox]

Sweet, I do coop on insane with 200 percent speed and try to kill a robot.

[Sykes]

Blarget pointed out that the reactor countdown timer after you destroy it is not effected by the speed changes, so at 200% speed, you have twice the time to escape

[karx11erx]

Well, the timeout is a time and not a speed thing. 30 secs are 30 secs, whether you are driving 50 or 100 mph.

[Sykes]

That is true, which is why I wouldn't call it a bug or anything. Just an interesting behavioral note

[Sirius]

I don't actually think most computer science curricula teach students how to program... properly, at least. They'll teach you the "toolbox", but not workmanship... well, apart from the use of comments. From what I saw when I was studying for my Bachelor's degree, they'd leave you to figure out for yourself how to avoid writing programs that would send you into debugging hell. And the art of debugging in general, actually. Granted you can pick that up with experience post-graduation, but I saw no evidence you couldn't graduate with a CS degree without really being able to write meaningful programs that actually worked. So far it sounds like that happens in most places (the university I studied at reportedly had the best CS programme in New Zealand).

You knew who the good programmers in class were though. No doubt about that.

[karx11erx]

Point is that many, if not most computer science graduates end up as programmers, so they should also learn methods and paradigms. I wasn't talking about debugging, I was talking about well structured, well written software.

[Alter-Fox]

The guy who sits behind me in CS lab apparently still doesn't understand the concept of syntax. Last friday the lab demonstrator basically wrote his program for him and gave him credit for it... which was very frustrating for me because I was waiting an extra half an hour to get my completed program marked so that I could leave.
No, the program wasn't anything terribly sophisticated or useful in the slightest. The class taught me some things but not what I wanted to be taught.
Oh well, there are a few classes left...

[Sirius]

Yeah, program structure doesn't show up much either past a trivial level (indenting? lol).

[Sykes]

I was working in the CS labs at the top engineering school in this country (Rose-Hulman) a few months ago, and overheard one of the students teaching his professor what command prompt was, and how to use it. Mind you this was a software engineering professor, who uses nothing but Windows, and he was being tought by his student what command prompt was. Not quite programming, but it's related...

[Sirius]

That's... interesting. There are a lot of command-line tools even for Windows. Most introductory programs are console applications, as well.

[Sykes]

It was really hard to keep from letting out a slight chuckle from across the lab =P

[Woodpecker]

Lucky for him DOS doesn't really exist anymore. I bet he couldn't get back into windows from that fullscreen prompt!

[Sykes]

Sounds like the recent bugs have been a nightmare. Good luck fixing them.