glenjimen wrote: ↑14 Jun 2020 19:20
Oh wow, I'm glad to see you are still making progress on this project.
This seems as good a thing to quote as any, even if not written by the author.
OK, I know, I said I'd let it lie, but it's been a
decade, and furthermore this doesn't look like progress; it looks like throwing away a chunk of the 3D graphics engine written after throwing away whatever was written for the original idea of making something work in 2D (which at the very least included a bunch of pixel art) and quite possibly some other throwings-away. (Likewise, how many Websites have been put up and thrown down? I think I count two, and that was just to 2011.) Of course, sometimes a new tool or library or whatever is so good it's worth doing that... but sometimes you need to stick with the devil you know or you'll never get anything out.
smallfly: in your most productive year so far, how many lines of code dealing with actual gameplay did you write that are still in the game?
Let's assume, generously, that you enjoy the life expectancy of a Japanese man born today, and that from now on you will always be as productive as your best year - to the very day you die, you will be just as mentally capable, physically able to program, unconstrained by IRL circumstances, and dedicated to the project as you are now - or rather, as you have been at the peak of the last decade.
Since you were in your early 20s when you started, given these assumptions, you can expect to live around 50 more years.
How many lines of gameplay code would 50 times your most productive year be? Would it be more than OpenTTD? Would it be, even possibly, as many as a project vastly more ambitious than OpenTTD?
(Let me be a cynic and ask - would it be more than
robotfindskitten?)
Quite aggressively omitting anything that is OS-specific or pertains to sound or music or the details of how graphics are done, I find about 300,000 lines of code in OpenTTD. In other words, assuming (again) you are exceptionally fortunate in terms of physical and mental health, if you write 16 lines of code _every day_ from now until they prise the keyboard from your cold dead hands, you will have a project _as_ complex as OpenTTD. How does that compare with your productivity over the last decade? (You can count your comments too...)
Are you using a version control system yet?
In view of the answers to the questions above, what are the odds of you ever releasing anything like what you originally envisaged?
I'm saying this not to be unpleasant but to say, for God's sake, don't spend
another decade of your life on this. Even if tinkering with it brings you pleasure, you could find a project you can finish and get pleasure from doing that!