I Like To Think I'm Pretty Good

Focus Is A Matter Of Deciding What Things You're Not Going To Do.

The Important Point Is That The Cost Of Adding A Feature Isn't Just The Time It Takes To Code It. The Cost Also Includes The Addition Of An Obstacle To Future Expansion. Sure, Any Given Feature List Can Be Implemented, Given Enough Coding Time. But In Addition To Coming Out Late, You Will Usually Wind Up With A Codebase That Is So Fragile That New Ideas That Should Be Dead-simple Wind Up Taking Longer And Longer To Work Into The Tangled Existing Web. The Trick Is To Pick The Features That Don't Fight Each Other.

The Escalation Programmers Come From A Completely Different Background, And The Codebase Is All Stl This, Boost That, Fill-up-the-property List, Dispatch The Event, And Delegate That. I Had Been Harboring Some Suspicions That Our Big Codebases Might Benefit From The Application Of Some More Of The Various “modern” C++ Design Patterns, Despite Seeing Other Large Game Codebases Suffer Under Them. I Have Since Recanted That Suspicion.

The Idea That I Can Be Presented With A Problem, Set Out To Logically Solve It With The Tools At Hand, And Wind Up With A Program That Could Not Be Legally Used Because Someone Else Followed The Same Logical Steps Some Years Ago And Filed For A Patent On It Is Horrifying.

One Of The Big Lessons Of A Big Project Is You Don't Want People That Aren't Really Programmers Programming, You'll Suffer For It!