The mis-adventures of a new Game Developer.
I could have built rome in a day with a 'for' loop.
Published on July 15, 2005 By Mudflap In GalCiv Journals
Rome wasn't built in a day.
I could have built rome in a day with a 'for' loop.
Probably could have done it in half a day with an stl::vector.
But, somebody may have to debug it later on and it would take them at least a week to read the the stl gunk.
So goes the argument.

Why would you use the STL in a game? I don't know. I'm just used to it so it doesn't bother me. Besides, where can you get a fully debugged, fast, and robust hash map of variable length arrays in a couple lines of readable code? Then again, if you need that in a game you're probably going way too far right? Wrong, some of the cooler stuff we do requires that kind of data management.

Anyways, no screenshots this week sorry.
I did some pretty good work this week. I finished the research screen. It's got a cool parallax background in the tree area now.
You'll have to stick around 'till later betas if you want to see it, but believe me, if you didn't like the GC1 research window, you'll love this one.
I also added the API's for the pie chart stuff. It should be easy for us to get pie charts all over the screen now.
I spent a lot of time fixing some of those niggly bugs that everyone hates. For instance, "Time to Build: 0 Weeks". What is this "0 Weeks" stuff?!?!?
We also got a new programmer this week. He's been doing some amazingly cool stuff with the ship battles.

The best thing I learned this week is that having editors choice awards makes you a better programmer.

Comments
on Jul 26, 2005
One thing that you should keep in mind is that the algorithmic guarantees on the STL's map class are not hash style guarantees, but rather tree style. Insertion, deletion, and find are all O(ln n) rather than O(1). If you are using or then you are safer, but then again, the availability is gone from a cross platform perspective -- there is no hash map in the STL, so it might not be available on all compilers.