http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4 ... hp?print=1 now Uber Employees (and fellow Uber Nation Citizens) should share any dirty coding tricks they've experienced and/or committed. [PS:] i almost cried when i read The Programming Antihero.
Here's one I just employed. Massive Macros. Our macro file just grew by about 20x because I took all the balance numbers from everywhere in the game and put them as macros in one simple file. This saves me hours and hours from wading through endless projectile, weapon, pawn, damage type and skill files. This isn't totally a 'dirty coding trick' but the time it saves is huge. btw... I've started a massive balancing effort.
I've been a purist who likes to avoid dirty coding tricks as much as possible. It's my job to tell people when they've done something half-assed and get them to fix it appropriately. If you don't keep on top of this stuff bad things happen. Even code that is going into a project at the last minute still needs to be good because there will probably be continued work from that codebase. I don't consider Comes little balance trick to be bad. It's just working with the pragmatic reality of the engine we are working with.
I near you neutrino!!! Where I work we have a 'grown' intranet structure, split into many databases and its hell to maintain it or add something. You need a php function? Well, then you better know where to start looking because there is no documentation whatsoever and to describe the strucuture on the server with randomized would be kind! I dread the day when the last one of the guys who slapped that system together leaves... I think for balancing Sactis trick will work great though. I was part of a modding team and we made a new faction for FA. Not a lot of fun to go through 50+ blueprints to change something small.
