CNCNZ.com New Article: Totally Not Angry Response To Stupid Community Comments

[Plok 327]

1 minute ago, neojames82 said:

since they foolish let themselves go into so much debt they had no choice but to make a deal with the devil.

Again, wrong. Virgin was the one who got into debt, not Westwood. They owned Westwood before EA, you know.

[neojames82 6]

6 minutes ago, Plokite_Wolf said:

Again, wrong. Virgin was the one who got into debt, not Westwood. They owned Westwood before EA, you know.

That I did know, actually. What I was talking about, is when Westwood got themselves into a lot of debt with the whole Earth and Beyond failure, which forced them to be enveloped into EA completely.

[Blade 12]

On 23/09/2017 at 10:49 PM, Stygs said:

That allways reminds me of a quote from Renegade and DCoder, two of the guys working on the ARES patch for RA2:

<DCoder> MouseClass extends ScrollClass, which extends TabClass, which extends SidebarClass, which extends PowerClass, which extends RadarClass, which extends DisplayClass, which extends MapClass, which extends GScreenClass
<Renegade> -_^
<Renegade> so basically, the radar is a kind of mouse?
<DCoder> reverse
<Renegade> yeah....I think I may have identified one of westwood's development problems

That quote either shows a misunderstanding by DCoder and Renegade of how those classes are intended to function or is just a flippant comment by him reflecting his poor opinion of the Westwood coders. That "MouseClass" related to handling the drawing state of the mouse in the context of handling input and drawing of all the elements of the game screen.

A deep inheritance like this was a common design pattern at the time the original games were written and is probably present in other contemporary games that haven't had their code examined in the same detail. It isn't an example of bad coding as the quote makes it appear. The inheritance is not intended to imply a "type of" relationship that introductory OOP courses use to relate the OOP concepts to real world examples. Instead it represents discreet elements of the final object that are all tightly coupled to each other. Modern coding practices would probably have them all be friend classes of each other and have instances of them as members of a containing class to achieve the same result.