Off-Topic Discussion > Programming

Choosing a programming project

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niffiwan:
I'm certainly not an SCP expert; but these are a couple of bugs that seem like they should be fairly straight forward to fix.  I think they both just need conditional checks added to the relevant sections of the code.  (Of course, I'm not familiar with those sections of the code myself so I could be completely wrong about how simple the solutions would be..).  As for reproducing the issues; I'd hope that the bug submitters

http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=2928
http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=3010

As for the question in the OP; I find it difficult to answer in a useful way.  I think I need a driving need or a deep personal interest in the project. I need something that will motivate me to spend the required time learning about what I need to know to be able to write the program, and to be able to push on when I inevitably realise that I've taken the wrong approach and need to refactor large portions of what I've already done  :lol:

Polpolion:
I don't do much outside of work these days but usually what I do try is usually because I want to try some library/technology, or something random online piques my interest. My current half-hearted project is a simple game engine. It's a smaller project than you'd think because you really can't do too much in spare time without focusing on a particular kind of engine, but it would be a nice starting point for the handful of game ideas I have as well as keeping my paltry knowledge of SDL and OpenGL from getting too out of date. Before that I wanted to write a program that would pull NYSE data from Google finance and see what I could glean from it with some machine learning algorithms, but I gave that up pretty quick. Before that I wrote a simple logic programming language based on s-expressions mostly because I had written a parser a few years earlier and I thought the idea was kind of neat (though useless; context-free but not turing complete).

I can't really maintain interest in any one thing for more than a couple weeks at a time. Work is a bit of a mixed blessing for motivation because I see a lot of interesting problems and ideas but it's difficult to spend 9 hours a day programming then come home and spend a few more hours programming. Most of the reason I'm still working on the game engine is because I know that if I finish it I'll be able to repeatedly come back to it as a starting point, and if I code it right it will be useful for more than just games.

emkay:
Thanks, niffiwan, I might have a closer look as soon as I find time again.

Maybe there's another rather psychological thing to it: If the bug really should be easy to fix, why didn't anyone fix it yet...? ;-)

Just kidding, of course I know that there are different priorities to them. And maybe those "small" low-prio bugs are even left for a reason: To give others the possibility to get familiar with the code and give them the feeling of being helpful (which they actually really are) very soon.


Reproduction is indeed an issue for some (or many?) bugs. But for me it's admittedly rather laziness: I just don't want to install a particular mod just to be able to start a mission where the error was found in the first place and is guaranteed to be reproducible. But of course, I know that that is actually not the proper attitude for really getting into bugfixing.

We'll see... maybe I just have to convince myself a little bit more. :-)

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