[MUD-Dev] Is database access a bottleneck?

[Sean Kelly]

bradley newton haug wrote:
> Raph Wrote:
 
>> Everything you so amusingly described here is definitely true in
>> the game industry. There's a distaste for academia that is
>> incredibly short-sighted in my opinion, and a reluctance to make
>> use of tools or techniques developed elsewhere. It's all stupid.
 
> There is a distaste for *anything* written outside game company
> walls, while admirable (some systems are just damned fun to
> implement), it's a really bad habit that breeds more isolationist
> engineers.

And precludes talented non-industry people from ever working for a
game company.

>> On the other hand, it didn't arise out of thin air. Quite aside
>> from the not-invented-here symdrome characteristic of largely
>> self-taught hackers, there's the fact that many of the solutions
>> arrived at by academic AI researchers and military simulation
>> developers are simply not practical in games development. Kind of
>> like how most of the demos that the video card engineers provide
>> to the game developers aren't practical.
 
> Cowboy coders seam neat until you have to fix something they did.
> Then you throw books at them when you see em.  I went right from
> mudlib/driver coding to Microsoft.  I spent a year adjusting to a
> giant.  I don't like either method personally.

That's like going from building garage racers to designing
automobiles at Ford.  There is definately a happy meduim :) I've
decided I most prefer smaller-sized companies.  The small dev-team
environment is great but so are talented, experienced coworkers, and
enough structure so things like crunch-time never really happen.

>> It cuts both ways; people on both sides of the fence need to gain
>> more respect for what the other does and does well. It's the
>> insularity and automatic assumption that "we know better" that is
>> the problem across the board.

> I think the best thing to do, in any field is to never assume you
> have the best solution, try for it, get to a good place, but never
> stop looking around.

This is always my first piece of advice to a new programmer.
Whatever problem you face, chances are someone much smarter than you
has faced the same problem before and already solved it in a much
more elegant manner than you could devise.  Over time, as you gain
experience, you discover that there are fewer of these "someone's"
than there once were, but it always pays to look around a bit first
before trying to re-invent the wheel.  IMO the greatest problem with
geeks is their propensity to egotism.

Sean


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