5 ms·
this is great. if you look at older game source code you find things like this. things that we view as horrible hacks which are both extremely stable and perf
by naikrovek 3y ago
this is great. if you look at older game source code you find things like this. things that we view as horrible hacks which are both extremely stable and perform well.
i see no reason to stop using these types of solutions, when appropriate.
- muzani 3y agoOld games also didn't use a database, they saved everything in a giant text file. I'm not sure if they were "extremely stable" though. Like Myspace, it might only work up until a certain point. What kills stuff is usually going viral.
- naikrovek 3y agoI think you maybe underestimate the utility and reliability of flat text files on a filesystem. If you don’t trust a filesystem, you can’t trust anything that uses one. Flat files don’t scale past a certain point, but that point is way higher than most believe it is.
- o11c 3y agoSpecifically, flat files scale very far if there are no concurrent partial updates. And "fork off a new process just to do the save" helps move that point farther away.
- lmm 3y agoSuppressing errors and continuing to run in a corrupt state is good for games (crashing is definitely not fun, continuing to run might be fun, unless it's the kind of game where you can get yourself locked out of winning long ahead of time) but not good for most other kinds of code - it's better for your accounting code to crash than to save the wrong numbers!
- ricardobayes 3y agoMicrocontroller/embedded stuff also.