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engine design document...

Started by no one Nov 24, 2003 at 2:54 PM 1 replies 350+ views
Original Post
no one
no one
Hiya Man, I moved a few weeks ago and have been so busy with things that I haven''t coded even a single line in about 3 weeks. Anyway though, I opend up a project I was working on today and went thru some of the code and started to clean things up and tried to think about what I was doing with it. I realized though that something was wrong with it. That something is a good design plan. Everytime I try to make a good design doc, it always winds up being more like a step by step manuel for others then a design for my self, either that I write 10k side notes detaling things. What is the common way to write a design doc, I know what I want and the techniques im using, I just can''t figure out how to turn them into a plan. Can anyone give me a link or something to someone else design plan for ideas? Thanks and Cheers! ~_n_o_ _o_n_e_ Ps. This may sound rather vague I know but I just would like some opinions as to what the design doc should contain and such.
"Make it a habit to be loyal to the activities that serve the highest part of yourself."
no one
no one
Hmm, looks like Sijmen is looking for the same thing basically.
Well, an answer to either which one im sure will help us
"Make it a habit to be loyal to the activities that serve the highest part of yourself."
RapidStunna
RapidStunna
I'm a visual learner, so writing text after text about what my engine should do does nothing for me but waste time. If that's you, take this advice:

When you have some free time, grab some computer paper and just draw what you vision your app to look like at one of its stages. Then, for me at least, you just start getting ideas from that drawing. You may need more drawings. I usually end up making a whole bunch of sections of function and class prototypes. You'll find that you'll probobly change much of what you design when you actually start coding, but that's a good thing because then your code becomes your canvas, rather than a useless piece of paper.

Just to give you an idea, I'm writing my level editor. So far, after two weeks in programming, I have 11 computer pages worth of design (only on front side). And that's about 1500 lines of pure code (excluding comments and white space). So I've got a while to go, but seeing the docs is helpful to the point where it would be unreasonable to try to program without them.

Anyway, I hope you can take something from my methology. It's a design, program, design, program, design, program, reorganize process. Notice the reorganization. There you take all the messay code you have and organize it into production quality code. Definitly a needed step if you want a large-scale project.

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Brent Gunning | My Site

[edited by - RapidStunna on November 24, 2003 6:49:27 PM]

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