Day 217: Extended Rest

The subject is a reference to D&D 4th edition. A normal extended rest lasts about 6-8 hours. In my case, it was nearly two months!

But I have resumed. It turns out that optimizing code is fairly soul-crushing. The flipside of "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is today's Programming Tip of the Day:

It's not premature optimization if it's actually time to optimize

But if you've been approaching development the entire time with the attitude that you don't need to optimize, it becomes quite an adjustment to go back to the problem parts and realize how horrible your code actually was.

I want to post this before midnight, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on the fixes. Most involved caching a value rather than recalculating it, something I know is faster but won't do unless the situation really calls for it, as I've been bitten in the ass before by out-of-date cache data. I replaced a linear search of an array that happened every frame with a dictionary lookup, which provided the expected results.

So on one hand, not optimizing early is a good idea. On the other hand, you have to pay for it later when the time comes. On the gripping hand, the code's so poor that I really had nowhere to go but up!