On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 22:05:18 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 09:40:50PM +0000, tide via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 21:31:02 UTC, 0xEAB wrote:
[...]
> Furthermore, how often have we cursed about games that hung
> up with a blackscreen and didn't let us close them by any
> mean other than logging off? If they just crashed, we'd not
> have run into such problems.
That's assuming an assert catches every error. Not all bugs
are going to be caught by an assert. I don't think I've ever
had a game hung up in a black screen and not be able to close
it.
I have, and that's only one of the better possible scenarios.
I've had games get into a bad state, which becomes obvious as
visual glitches, and then proceed to silently and subtly
corrupt the save file so that on next startup all progress is
lost.
Had the darned thing aborted at the first visual glitch or
unexpected internal state, instead of blindly barging on
pretending that visual glitches are not a real problem, the
save file might have still been salvageable.
(Yes, visual glitches, in and of themselves, aren't a big deal.
Most people may not even notice them. But when they happen
unexpectedly, they can be a symptom of a deeper, far more
serious problem. Just like an assert detecting that some
variable isn't the expected value. Maybe the variable isn't
even anything important; maybe it just controls the color of
the title bar or something equally irrelevant. But it could be
a sign that there's been a memory corruption. It could be a
sign that the program is in the middle of being exploited by a
security hack. The unexpected value in the variable isn't
merely an irrelevant thing that we can safely ignore; it could
be circumstantial evidence of something far more serious.
Continuing to barrel forward in spite of clear evidence
pointing to a problem is utterly foolish.)
T
I'm just wondering but how would you code an assert to ensure the
variable for a title bar is the correct color? Just how many
asserts are you going to have in your real-time game that can be
expected to run at 144+ fps ?
