Leonion said:
I didn't see the code until around 10 Nov 2014, so about a month after the thread you quoted. At that time I was still lost as to what went where in the module system. I mostly tried attacking gender issues in the dialog for the first month and was waiting for "someone" to help me. I think you're now in the similar situation I was in. Once in awhile Michadr came out of hibernation but to be direct he seldom spent more than 2-3 days and then he'd stop and have a new "computer" issue, "internet" issue, or life issue. He has a fair idea what module does what but its been a long time since every line in the code was reviewed by him. He may be, however, the best you've got for questions and answers.
I left a lot of footprints and tried changes of many sorts. I always went after infrastructure change but felt someone else whould tweak troops, items, etc. I'm happy you cut the bloat by 50%. The code in Perisno could use a serious dose of streamlining but it is very difficult to put in so many OSPs without side effects. It took me at least a year to straighten out conflicts in the data model, as originally Perisno had declarations for diplomacy following the other declarations, and after PBOD declared its own variables, diplomacy declared variables, and Native implicitly declared huge arrays but the size of these structures was vague and always presumed to be similar to native there were huge regions of overlap that appeared only after mid game, leading to great frustration. This is why towards the end of my "tenure" I published the data model as an open spec, mostly for your benefit as a roadmap.
I have this long history of complaining about not getting help, but at least you don't complain. Perisno always had a large number of so-called "lead devs" that weren't leading or developing, and instead its safer to have a title sort of "I was here but the label wasn't important". It's nice to get anyone to even read the comments.
I had a great vacation transforming Phosphor into Warsword Rigale under the Rigale forum. I can't say it's been without controversy either but Nameless Warrior carried his weight in terms of changes and I seldom had to spend much time fixing his code. I'd say we each spent equal time reviewing the other's mistakes, he and I, but it has occured with mutual respect.
I'm really glad the NEW Perisno team is making changes as a team instead of putting it all on one person's shoulders. THAT is how to burn someone out fast. It takes a long time to understand the code of everyone else -- what I assume was "intuitively obvious" does not even translate well into Russian. Sometimes comments from anyone else just do not exist, making it much harder to know why or how something was written in the way it was. At times it seems like it is a miracle it ever worked. Sometimes it seemed like spaghetti from so many different coders, of different skill levels. Looking at my own work I went from making terrible mistakes to simply bad mistakes to eventually clever mistakes and now they're closest to "lazy mistakes". Evolution...
You'll do better. It helps that you aren't in the same hurry I was. I knew my health would become an issue, and expected to run out of money or have to return to America or something. You can just glide for a while and with HALF the bloat from items pretty much everything goes faster, farther, and easier. I urge you to remove as many OSPs as give trouble or are not clear and keep it simple. Adding more factions, more villages, and especially more lords bumps up against the 400 banner soft cap in Warband, and Perisno 0.8 as of 1 year ago certainly was seeing that. Make it smaller and try again. Consider some reports to check the number of parties on the map, as that is a major source of lag, if I didn't already put one for you. I think I made that after I last touched .773
The rather huge team listed for Perisno tended to be specialized and there was always a bottleneck at the coding, which I think you've seen by now. It was a team heavy on artists, which is nice until that gives 3.5 GB bloat
Happy you settled into it...
- GS
