- Sep 30, 2017
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Sorry as a dev I'm going to disagree with you here.Again your points are moot -- even of modders have said such things.
It doesn't require a whole rebuild from scratch. Spaghetti code can be refactored. Not rewritten from scratch. If there was code that was patchwork from 3 or 4 different devs with varying standards of logic and execution. You look at those lines of code and refactor. Inevitably you will be slowly refactoring all associated code resembling a spiderweb of sorts.
But again -- that is NO REASON to rewrite code from scratch. The point being refactoring code is NOT the same as rebuilding. And there is no reason -- even when modders have said previous builds had garbage codebases to rewrite the entire thing. Good practices lead to refactoring and retooling of existing code -- again, not a wipe from a clean slate kind of mindset.
His team was lazy or DC chose this decision with the intent of being able to milk Patreons even further -- or both.
Depending on how much changes you want to make it is definitely easier to Redo a project from scratch then to re-factor.
Fix something here, causes other things to break, then fixing the things that break causes other side effect. Chasing some unknown bug in code you did not write yourself. And then spending hours and house on trying to think what went on in the other developer's mind when he did this or that, wastes a lot of time.
I have a few years ago agreed to do continue and debug an existing system (Granted it was not written with software I was familiar with at the time). It was a nightmare. If I had re-written the software (Even in the same technology) it would have taken me 3 months of lost time, but bug-fixed thereafter would have been hours instead of days.
Instead I continued on that broken piece of software with infinite bugs for about 5 months until I decided to pass that problem on to someone younger than me, with more energy and optimism and more desperate for money then myself. The owner refused for the application to be re-written as they already paid for the development (Sunken cost)
Seen as this is a project that DC still want to work on for years to come, I can see his rationale for re-writing it.