250. WoT – the end

It’s usually about now in a large project, that I stop. It may seem crazy, but it’s all because I don’t program to make finished apps – I program to have fun, to challenge myself and learn, and to share what I learn.

So

• when I’ve done all the fun design and problem solving and learning, and now I have to make it all work, and
• when I know I’m making it only for myself, because the code is becoming too complex for anyone else to use, if I shared it, and
• when it gets harder and harder to add features because they interact with other parts of the program, making them difficult to test and debug, and
• it’s feeling more and like a chore

that’s when I usually stop.

For me, the challenges in this project were the initial model design, calculating damage based on the angle at which a shot hit the target tank, and calculating how visible a tank was, when hidden behind trees or buildings. And I’ve done them all now.

I could carry on, and have tanks chasing me round the map and shooting at me, but that’s a lot of work for something nobody is going to play. Also, it’s been two months on one project, and I want a change. I think what I’ll do instead is pull the things I learned out of this project, and put them in one of my ebooks, so they can be used by anyone who needs them.

That may include a little program that includes my tank model with simple controls to operate it, so it can be dropped into a 3D scene. If that isn’t too hard to do.