Sounds like a lot of this has been pre-designed.
Db, master server,melee server, users, logins, battles... All these are design decisions that are reducing choice.
Why not try to do something in your game, as a test, then write the bits that make that work...
I mean, you might end up with a free-form p2p game with no master server, and no persistent user info...
James
Yes, I like this answer – it goes right to the heart of the matter – “Growing” OOS…
Of course, life is rarely that simple, but still.
John D.
I would be careful with the extreme way of thinking like: DO NOT plan
or care about anything ahead. It looks like going from one doomed to
failure position which is: do complete and detailed plan before
starting to code (aka waterfall) to another which is 100% opposite: no
plans at all. I think both edges are not good, one has to strike a
balance between them :)
I've been building software commercially now for almost 20 years, and the longer I do it the less I understand what people mean by 'architecture'. Can anybody define it for me, at least in the context of this thread?
I always go back to the analogy of software architecture with house and town architecture.
How do you ensure the plumbing of a house works, and that the rooms are friendly, and the house doesn’t fall down?
How do you ensure that the houses and the roads and the bridges and the business fit together nicely?
It’s all what we might call architecture at different levels.
If you get to an architecture by letting it evolve, or you impose it from the outside – it’s still there and you can still – fruitfully – discuss it.
You may want to deny the word – but there’s something behind them.
John D.
'fundamental', 'components', 'environment', 'principles' : I probably need to circle around a few more times before grokking this.
I prefer JB's definition better. I think Martin Fowler also said something like "architecture is the stuff that you will wish you'd done differently" or something like that.
'fundamental', 'components', 'environment', 'principles' : I probably need to circle around a few more times before grokking this.
I prefer JB's definition better. I think Martin Fowler also said something like "architecture is the stuff that you will wish you'd done differently" or something like that.
Heh, I actually like the IEEE definition, although I agree it is a bit wordy. What I like is that it's expressed in terms of a "system" and, since systems can be nested, implies that architecture is at every level not any specific level. That's the way I see architecture: fractal.
I tell people that architecture is just large-scale design, and so the same principles apply in the large as in the small. Most people don't buy it at first.
I remember reading a definition of architecture that was something
like "decisions that would be too expensive to change". Anyone know
where that comes from?
Nat, have you tried thinking about architecture from a program-is-a-graph point of view?