Releasing code.

The joys of releasing your work to the public. The baby that you have hand-crafted, pouring over a hundred hours of your life and countless swear words into, exposed like an infant with a cut in a tiger pit. And like tigers, the public pounce mercilessly and tear their prey to shreds!

Actually, no they don’t. I might just be lucky in my target audience, but every comment that has come back to me has been respectful, encouraging and helpful. Everything so far has made me want to continue and to improve. It’s a weird feeling getting feedback - it is exhilarating finding ways to improve the program, but there’s a mix of teeth-grinding frustration and embarrassment when people point out bugs or easier ways to do something.

So this week I have been adding options, fixing bugs, improving user input areas and having a couple of further ideas for improvements based on all the feedback, and generally having a great old time doing so. As ever, there’s the horror of nothing working before you realise that you've just misspelled a variable name, but that just makes it feel even better when it runs perfectly. I offer up heartfelt thanks to everyone who has given suggestions for improvements over the past week (particularly Colin, who went above and beyond the call of duty).

I really don't like coding GUIs though. They're the worst. Apart from RTF, which I am sure is an anagram for 'complete and utter bastard' - it reared its head again with seemingly random language codes inserted to trip up some people (but not all). I wish I was good enough to code my own RTF control from scratch, but that's not happening in this lifetime.

Well, another release tonight. I wonder how many new bugs I've introduced :) As a programmer acquaintance said the other night when I proclaimed NPC Engineer complete....

"Finished. LOL!"

I was so naive back then, so fresh faced and innocent.

Maasq