Dprocs

We have a rather interesting interpreted language in-game that can be used to perform actions on a handful of triggers; an example might be to add an arbitrary 'use' function to an object. As an example of this, I once built a vacuum cleaner object which could be used to suck up pretty much anything you pointed it at. Sucked up things ended up inside the vacuum.

One drawback of this language is that it didn't have any concept of global data. I added that feature today, using a surprisingly small amount of code.

A surprisingly small amount of code that took me about three hours to write.

Once again, software complexity rears its ugly head. I actually made two false starts on this problem, each of which I had to back out before finally getting a minimal solution to it. The interpreter isn't really that complicated or large by any real programming standard, but it's still larger and more complicated than I could easily wrap my brain around.

It took about two hours to really figure out the best way to handle it, then about an hour to implement it. Most of that time was just trying to understand what was already there and how it all worked. And this is code I wrote!

On the plus side, my actual implementation, when I finished, had 2 bugs in it, both trivial. It's good to know that thorough understanding up front does in fact result in far fewer mistakes.