Re:Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a code base you thought w...
by b0afc375b5 on Monday August 08, 2022 @11:17AM
(#32386470)
Any video record of that lecture by any chance?
Re:Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a code base you thought w...
by surmoi on Monday August 08, 2022 @12:47PM
(#32387884)
Unfortunately not, it was supposed to be recorded, but some technical issues prevented this from happening :(
I wonder if it would be legally ok now that I've left that company to write a blog post about the content of that lecture. (taking into consideration that it's trivial to decompile the client code out of the game SWF file)
I haven't worked or saw that code base for more than 4 years, but I could probably just jump back right in it without problems.
End results was an easy to maintain code and very extensible. But also it taught me a lot on how to architect things, what patterns to pick, etc. To this date, I've never worked on games with a code base as good as this one. Instead I'm doomed to see all the problems those games have in terms of architecture... (sometimes I can help solve some of them, when I'm granting enough time, but it's rarely a priority for companies, since there's no user facing changes and can induce regressions)
I had the chance to port the code to C# for some R&D in Unity, although I didn't really know C# at that time... but because the code base was so well split into libraries that made sense for the game, I could port them and test them separately and was able to progress much faster than expected. First with a client running as a console app, then later in Unity.
My love for that code base went as far as giving a lecture at the local University about its architecture and the patterns used in it :)
Fun fact: The libraries in Dofus are named after Discworld references, the world rendering library is named Atuin for example. A terrible idea in retrospective for new developers joining the team who had to idea what Discworld was!