Craft over Art

This method talks about how indulging in your own artistic nature isn’t always the best option even if you think the product would turn out better if you did it this way. If you are being paid to build something that will solve a problem, this method of Craft over Art explains you need to really consider the situation at hand. In this method, the situation that is discussed is that you believe that you are able to do something outstanding and fantastic that will impress your colleagues. In this situation, you are building something for a user. You shouldn’t be indulging in artistic expression. A lot of the times when we are handed with a task, we can sometimes think about the most outstanding ways to do something, rather than just to get the task done. This can go two ways. Doing something outstanding for a task can be great and have it’s benefits, but what will it cost the effectiveness of it? On the other hand, we can do the task at hand and that will be that. We won’t be able to put any personal expression in it, but is that a bad thing? Of course it isn’t a bad thing. This method seems to be very similar to function over form.

It is a matter of situational awareness. This is something I really enjoyed from this article. Make more straightforward choices and do not try to “sugar coat” solutions. As soon as you start making unfavorable trade offs in certain scenarios, the outcome will not always be as you like. in other words if you want a straightforward answer, you should provide a straight forward solution. Even though this isn’t always the case, I learned that you should always try your best to just try and perform the basic tasks first without adding anything extra or unique. Quality takes time, but having the correct operations in a product is what can make all the difference.

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Practical Application of Adapter Method

This week I chose to write about the adapter method because it is a great tool to have when working with incompatible interfaces and will help me in the future by creating more of an understanding about different types of frameworks. Since we are learning about 3 different design patterns, I figured adapter would be an interesting topic because can be compared to the porting of programs or video games to different types of hardware/ interfaces. Let’s first start off by talking about what the Adapter Pattern is. The adapter pattern works to allow two incompatible interfaces either work together or use attributes of one another. One example is a memory card reader in a laptop. When a memory card is plugged into the card reader so that the laptop can interpret the data. This article talks about how media devices can be adapted to play different formats.

This article explains the difficulties of porting or adapting a video game to other platforms because of the middle-ware or libraries that need to be used. For example, let’s say one game is built for a PC, however down the road the developers would like to adapt it to work on mobile phones or tablets. One struggle of this is that some developer tools are often built with closed sourced tools. This means that the game would need to be rebuilt from the ground-up because the libraries and tools needed are locked. Some game development tools are aware of this and actually include tools to directly adapt the libraries from one platform for another. Some optimization is still necessary by the developer, however it makes it so that these games and programs can run across multiple platforms. The reason I believe developers would want to make their products available across multiple platforms is because they want to maximize profits by adding more groups of users to their potentially interest list.

Performance is also an issue, sometimes it is more than code that can hinder the game. The actual hardware can greatly impact an adaptation of the game due to the fact of how it was built for another hardware architecture. The article says “The number one showstopper in game porting is the usage of closed-source tools, engines or libraries. Game developers should be aware of the technical decisions they are making, and how they will later affect portability of their game.”. This can create great issues and slow down for development time, especially if a deadline needs to be met.

One more important take from the article is language choice. From the article, “Is it going to properly compile in all platforms? Will it perform well? Beware of “too new” languages with super features (for example C++11) that might not be completely supported in all platforms (as we have painfully realized).” As we can see, there are many factors in adaptation of different types of software, and if we can create our programs with future adaptations in mind, adapter implementation can be organized in such a way to make the process easier.

 

Article: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/222363/What_exactly_goes_into_porting_a_video_game_BlitWorks_explains.php