Day 16

My project got utterly broken, proved to be irretrievable and I managed to screw up some file hierarchies on my backup of my backup. You can’t just retrieve the files you have to get the references, assets and medidata correctly or Unity doesn’t really know what it’s supposed to look up things under. If you break your file associations then your entire project will not run the right way because there is a lot it has to do with what correlates to what. I kind of knew this before but apparently I did not know it enough backups to really circumnavigate something like that.

The ironic thing is I now know how to avoid that happening in the future just take my other copy and override what I did in the editor by just putting it in the start. That was my backup plan 3 unfortunately I managed to find an error on that, subsequently tried to fix it and ran into what happens when you copy local projects into different directories. Version control has never seemed so relevant but so far away. I did in fact install, build up some familiarity with git then I managed to destroy my entire project with it so I’m a little wary of trusting it right now. I’m sure I will but I kind of need some time to really look into that on my own and fix some minor technical issues. It doesn’t seem like the best use of time during this course and so it just isn’t going to happen. For now I’m making copies on different drives then get as a last ditch precaution.

Well at least my Skill in debugging things is going up. I managed to double my speed from the weekend and that was after doubling it from the last week. The strange thing is that that is going to be the thing that carries over to all other programming. No matter the programming language of project you’re working on that’s what it takes to become a programmer in your own right. Because that’s kind of the point of what we do. It’s of course great to be able to go to some other people and ask for help but if you’re just doing that and the challenges you overcome won’t be the thing that makes you great. I think that’s real programmer experience has nothing to do with the job years just how long you’re willing to keep learning this stuff and stand up and get the thing done. That’s really the distinguishing factor in most disciplines and I don’t think the programming is much different. with the place we’re going to learn the most is just being there debugging things. The only sad part about that is taking the time to figure out the last stretch really doesn’t feel like you’re making progress. That’s the deceptive part — debugging is probably the most universal and transferable experience we could possibly be doing.

However it’s frustrating because it doesn’t seem like it would be qualified well under the metrics of traditional progress. I think it will seem like a lot less stuff when I finally realize what a difference all that debugging makes. so I hope to get working on a project that I can actually use it on and actually feel how far I’ve come. It just won’t feel like that while I’m still on the same problem. that said I’ve almost completely brought it back to the point where I was at before it crashed over the weekend and then up and deleted all assets, code the whole project on Monday. I had eight major bugs resulting from what I had to do two piece back I starting point from history and the last week copy. Actually dealt with about seven of them, I’m not counting the nights because I never really solved that. Ironically I did figure out how to find out exactly what it was doing over the process of finding what was going wrong with everything else. After the meteor shower of debug log I applied to my code I found out that the thing I was doing actually works. Just probably haven’t named something or attach something correctly. Been noticing that a lot recently. On the one hand I feel kind of awful about it being such a small little bug that can trip me up like that but on the bright side I think that means I’m getting it right. All I need to do is figure out how to narrow down those little errors quicker and I will be a lot closer to the finished product than I think. apparently I mostly do get it right I just find one little mistake and then I assume that everything has been wrong up till then. If all my problems are really springy from naming conventions, small faux pas with syntax or simply accidentally toggling something that should be really a lot easier to take out than I thought. So I’ve actually been encountering more bugs but they are more minor than I thought it’s just a matter of tracking them all down.

Funny errors that I realized I created in trying to fix the other errors :

I created a fire laser method that didn’t close before my on damage method which was running infinitely — this caused power ups and enemies to rain from the sky is lasers just perpetually shot into the heavens. Fortunately, I had it fixed within about 20 seconds so that was great cuz I was about to think oh no I’ve broken my game and actually I was already on the right track to fixing it I just was missing that one last little thing I was putting in to fix the problem. It was a scary to see that will play testing though. All of that was from the lack of {} these. Strangely this is been the one time that I’ve run into this that I was actually a little bit intimidated of them I have almost forgotten that I’ve never used them before. I came from a language that did not have them. Aside from just learning the syntax of first this is really been the only time it’s been a problem. Takeaway lesson : what you think will be hard to master may not be and the real challenge will be the least confrontational of all the things, you are not always going to be able to anticipate where your problems lie. It’s best to find some data point within your program to think about instead of trying to assume.