
Development History.

  My first attempt to write a battletech program was back in 1996
for my Computer Science ISU (independent study unit). It had supoort
for upto 8 mechs at once, level 2 mechs and you could customize
some of the graphics. I only got an 85% on it, hey normally an 85% is 
a good mark but all the other projects where lame text apps that where
buggy and missed half of their neccassary features! Now enough of my
venting.

  I went on and did other things, and in spring of '99 I started work
on a complete rewrite. I managed to have a full GUI and a working 
Mech Editor, but I lost all my work due to a harddrive snafu.
I had sunk several months of spare time into that version and
decided after all that to give it a break.

  Boredom once again reared its ugly head in early 2001 and I went
to work on the sourcecode you now have at your disposal. Its been
a little more than a year and 600k+ of code and its still not done.
Yet.

The Mistakes I've made:

  I hadn't played a game of real Battletech for about 3 years before
I started work on MW3025, and I had forgotten about some of the 
complexities of the game. I dove straight into the project and just
started coding, which is good because I got a primitive ASCII version
done in under two weeks. Though unfortunatley because of a lack of a 
coherent plan as the program swelled it has become somewhat 
garbled. 

  When I say somehat garbled I mean almost INCOMPREHENSIBLE. I wrote
the thing and sometimes even I get lost in it. Maybe its not that
bad, it could do with some more comments and some housecleaning though.

  Because it started out on a old 16-bit compiler it was just
one source file, I didn't use a Project or a Make file. Since
I'm not that familiar with externs I never took the time to
split the file up and put it in a project so the compile time
is usually about 20+ seconds on my computer.

What I've learned:

  Bottom-up programming is fine for a small program (50k of source or less)
but anything larger and you should atleast sketch it out on a scrap of
paper.

  At the start I should of read the complete BMR cover to cover, maybe
twice and put down a general outline of the program on paper. But
if I knew the amount of work infront of me I probably would have
choosen a different project.

My Programming Style

  My Style? I have no style! Seriously. I like the nitty gritty of
programming, the really low level stuff like Assembly. I like to
program my own low level functions, like my own ASCII/ModeX/SVGA
routines. I don't use any assembly in MW3025 though because my
compiler reads ATT style only (which is really ugly), and not Intel
style which all my other stuff is written in.

  I don't really have much experience progamming under Windows 
because I found DOS much easier to work with for what I wanted
to do. 
