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Old 12-04-2001, 07:12 PM   #38
Jim Sachs
Developer
 
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Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Southern Oregon
Posts: 9,816
Yes, I have been following the discussions, and the fish-choosing requester will eventally be greatly improved. Morgan's designs are beautiful, but there are problems which I must overcome.

These examples are written in web-based languages like HTML, JAVA, etc., which can do things in one line of code which would take dozens of lines of C++ code, if they are possible at all. You would more or less tell the computer to "Draw a blue box about 50% the size of the screen, which will resize itself with the window, find the picture FISH1.jpg, and put it in the upper left corner". That would take me a couple of days in C++, even if I knew how to decompress JPEGs.

But C++ runs hundreds of times faster, so it's the only viable language for me to use for real-time 3D and animation. (Assembly language runs even faster, but I'd like to get the Aquarium done within the 21st century.)

Don't forget - I'm not a real programmer. Real programmers have studied this stuff in school. If you ask them to implement a text box with some pictures of fish in it, they already know how, and can probably give you an estimate of how long it will take.

If you ask me for a new feature, I initially have not a clue how it would be done, or if it's even possible. So I spend a very large amount of time scouring the Internet for examples which are close to what the new feature might need. A lot of these examples use "clever" coding - which means can't understand them. Most often, I won't be able to find anything, and will have to invent something from scratch, which can easily cause another part of the program to break. Another problem is that I have almost no math skills, so I must break everything down to simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication. (Tried division once, but crashed with a lot of "Division by zero" errors.)

I didn't mean for this message to develop into a rant, I just wanted to say that all these designs look like very intimidating programming tasks to me.
Jim Sachs
Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium
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