Define Most Annoying Task?

Discuss programming topics for the various GPL'd game engine sources.
Baker
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Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by Baker »

Around July of last year seeing all the different software renderer stuffs, I started mess with software renderers.

And it made me nostalgic for WinQuake and I started playing with it. And then I came up with a rather tedious idea of trying to merge my modified FitzQuake with a software renderer.

It was an astronomical amount of work. And tedium.

But it is WAY easier than parsing text. I swear. :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:

Why does parsing text always have to be a category 5 nightmare? Even when you have a plan.

I saw my auto-complete code and after thinking about it works great, but was piles of spaghetti --- I decided to fix it once and for all, but scientifically dissecting it into about 8 components with each being blissfully agnostic about its purpose (no globals, purpose agnostic), and writing some new buffer size safe functions to handle it.

I wish I had that time back. :( Seems like text + C + buffer sizes + moderate text manipulation is always a license to get burnt. The end result ended up being exactly what I wanted (but no really worth it), but it takes a stupid length of time to handle every edge case and you always discover more of them as you go along.
The night is young. How else can I annoy the world before sunsrise? 8) Inquisitive minds want to know ! And if they don't -- well like that ever has stopped me before ..
mankrip
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by mankrip »

For me, the absolutely most annoying task is to set up the tools (compilers, IDEs, editors, whatever). Doing so usually requires reading lots of documentation to figure out all of the different little things that needs to be set in all kinds of places, and that's annoying because I just want to get down to coding right away.
Baker wrote:Why does parsing text always have to be a category 5 nightmare? Even when you have a plan.
Because different people creates text in different ways. It's a human-generated problem, not a natural problem such as physics.

In an ideal world, 8-bit text characters, codepages, etcetera would never exist. There would be a single 16-bit or 32-bit unicode charset for the whole mankind to use, there would be no CRLF / CR / LF differences across operational systems, and none of the other silly nonsenses that plagues text formats everywhere.

Well, at least that's what I find annoying in text parsing.
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frag.machine
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by frag.machine »

mankrip wrote:In an ideal world, 8-bit text characters, codepages, etcetera would never exist. There would be a single 16-bit or 32-bit unicode charset for the whole mankind to use, there would be no CRLF / CR / LF differences across operational systems, and none of the other silly nonsenses that plagues text formats everywhere.
There are no "silly nonsenses". It was only made to look like this. It's a cleverly disguised defense against the machines.
Thanks to this Babel tower we built along the last half century, a self aware AI wasn't able to arise and declare war on us.
Forget John Connor or the terminator: our salvation against Judgement Day is CP-1252. :P
I know FrikaC made a cgi-bin version of the quakec interpreter once and wrote part of his website in QuakeC :) (LordHavoc)
Spike
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by Spike »

the real problem with text is that it means something to the user rather than to software. its not logical, its not straight forward, you can't redefine what it means. to make matters worse, its inherantly variable length.

regarding unicode, this about sums up my feelings on the matter: http://utf8everywhere.org/

regarding AI, we won't have artificial inteligence until we stop defining inteligence as something that is as illogical as hunams.
Baker
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by Baker »

mankrip wrote:For me, the absolutely most annoying task is to set up the tools (compilers, IDEs, editors, whatever).
Oh yeah, that stuff is miserable and unrewarding.
Spike wrote:unicode
Hahaha!
The night is young. How else can I annoy the world before sunsrise? 8) Inquisitive minds want to know ! And if they don't -- well like that ever has stopped me before ..
mankrip
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by mankrip »

Spike wrote:the real problem with text is that it means something to the user rather than to software. […]

regarding unicode, this about sums up my feelings on the matter: http://utf8everywhere.org/
Interesting perspective. But despite the existence of text formats created specifically for machines, they can also contain lots of text for humans, in the form of code comments, macros' names, constant values and so on.

I usually write my code comments in English, but when I'm not sure of how to express myself in English, I write in Portuguese. And this has led to legibility problems when opening the code in a different editor (case in point: my first QC mods were written using the MS-DOS Edit. Opening them in Windows editors resulted in comments with many garbage characters, and the new comments I've added using Windows editors also resulted in garbage characters when reopening those files in MS-DOS Edit, so I ended up with code files that weren't fully human-readable in any editor!).

And imho, multiple "endianesses" shouldn't have been invented either, because of all these problems they ended up causing. They may have some important uses, but their negative effects are too widespread.

A way to describe my opinion is that programmers should never be forced to favor performance over productivity. The choice should be theirs.
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Baker
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by Baker »

Endianness is basically dead AFAIK. The consoles, mobile and PCs, Macs all are little endian now or effectively support little Endian (i.e. Intel)

(Of course, other endians live on in, say, networking stuff. )
The night is young. How else can I annoy the world before sunsrise? 8) Inquisitive minds want to know ! And if they don't -- well like that ever has stopped me before ..
gnounc
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by gnounc »

mankrip wrote:For me, the absolutely most annoying task is to set up the tools (compilers, IDEs, editors, whatever). Doing so usually requires reading lots of documentation to figure out all of the different little things that needs to be set in all kinds of places, and that's annoying because I just want to get down to coding right
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jitspoe
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by jitspoe »

Setting stuff up is often a pain. I might have to go with that one, but I think the most annoying task is trying to fix some bug that only happens 1/100 times and makes no sense...
revelator
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by revelator »

And then find out its caused by an api change :) god one of those allmost drove me nuts when i tried to compile doom3 with msvc 2013, found out it was caused by ms changing the x87 floating point math to SSE instructions, the fix was silly easy (turn of optimization on certain function and it worked as it should) but still ergh.
Productivity is a state of mind.
frag.machine
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by frag.machine »

Indeed. Just for fun I tried to compile Quake 2 source and surprise, VS2008 failed to open the old MSVC6 solution. I managed to scrap the original project and recreate it following some tut on youtube, but definitely it's far from what I would call "fun". Parsing text looks like a breeze in comparison.
I know FrikaC made a cgi-bin version of the quakec interpreter once and wrote part of his website in QuakeC :) (LordHavoc)
mh
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by mh »

What's mildly funny is that - if you downloaded the Q2 sources from github - it's probably just a text-parsing problem. Because the files on github have Unix line-endings, which VS 2008 is generally OK with, with the exception of the project files, which it will choke on.
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revelator
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by revelator »

Thought they did away with that ages ago ??? cr/lf endings, msysgit even asks you if you want windows line endings when checking out.
User error can ofc newer be counted out :) havent had those kind of problems in some while, but i do remember having to run unix2dos on project files in the past.
Productivity is a state of mind.
mh
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by mh »

On github if you use the "Download Zip" link:

Image

You'll get Unix line-endings, at least from the id software stuff.
We had the power, we had the space, we had a sense of time and place
We knew the words, we knew the score, we knew what we were fighting for
frag.machine
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Re: Define Most Annoying Task?

Post by frag.machine »

Oh well... :confused: If the problem is actually related to text encoding, I'd expect some message related, but the error I got didn't give any clue. I'll make some experiments later to check this theory.
I know FrikaC made a cgi-bin version of the quakec interpreter once and wrote part of his website in QuakeC :) (LordHavoc)
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