Some people can't get enough of metadata. Meta Is Murder. But to some folks, people without the craftsmanship and experience, this is the right thing to do:
/**
* Maps a BuildChangeDTO to a BuildChange.
* @param source the BuildChangeDTO
* @return the BuildChange entity.
*/
BuildChange mapToEntity(BuildChangeDTO source);
Architects 1 and 2 littering the day-time job code by the hundreds with this kind of thing. Worth noting is that the implementation is one row. Metadata - data 5:1! (Do you too feel violence is the only option? :) I've only worked in smaller firms earlier where incompetence isn't allowed to flourish like this, but see if I care - I'm only going to be on this project for a few more months. The saddest part is probably that this will soon enough lead to the demise of the backbone of Swedish export economy. It's only a matter of time anyway of course. But at least unemployment will go down, and at the same time liberty will go up.
Right now I'm working on a bit of rendering. It will look like shit to those that care about quality graphics - it doesn't look "real" at all - but by my standards I'd say it's coming along nicely. When I have something good enough for the computer I will have to port to OpenGL ES 1 (on iOS, I don't use shaders as OpenGL ES 2 requires and don't even know how yet), which I suspect will take quite some time. Portability is proving to not be at all what I thought it would be. I thought it would be "port basics and write the rest portably", but it's much more than that. When I get into the details I find quirks everywhere. My last bug fix (mouse controls on Mac) which I had thought would take an hour, instead took a whole evening, as meant I had to rewrite the input polling to an even driven thingie due to a bug in HID Utilities. Bah! I'll get there eventually, it's just going to take more time than I'd hoped.
One other thing I thought more about lately is using a super-cheap VPS or two to run my server on. I really feel I have to, as the game won't have a single-player experience worth mentioning, or rather a casual one, which, if you ask me, isn't worth mentioning. The single-player part will be for the five-year-olds, the multiplayer part for the teenagers. Nothing for the grown-ups I'm afraid. The more I think about it the more certain I am. That's the way it has to go. VPS - oh yeah baby! At least here will portability come in handy...
