From my experience this kind of disaster persist in all areas of development. And game dev is not an exception. Moreover you will find that here time is always lacking and programmers are under constant pressure to do things fast. Most of the time it results in severe quality loss. I can't say for everyone but the code I've worked with was mostly of low quality. What's even more horrible is that sometimes I see myself doing bad coding for the sake of speed, because it's what I need to do in order to meet deadlines.

My blue dream however is to find the job where the coding would be nice and slow with planning and refactoring as required and no pressure applied. I hope I'll find it someday...

Originally posted by devast3d
My blue dream however is to find the job where the coding would be nice and slow with planning and refactoring as required and no pressure applied. I hope I'll find it someday...

There is no such place in any industry where you have to ship a product.

The answer, of course, is that we have to deal with legacy code all the time. Code rots like anything else, even code you wrote a year or two ago isn't quite up to snuff anymore. It's not that the authors of that code are bad, it's that design changes or iteration reveals something to be different than the original design.

For example, I'm currently refactoring the system that builds the list of all scored advertisements on interactions in the game. It's not that I didn't build it correctly in the first place, it's that the design changed, so I needed to consolidate things.

The Sims Medieval was the worst though. We had tons of legacy code The Sims 3.

-Rez

I'm refactoring a system written just a few months ago, and it is already a legacy system. Too bad I can't complain too much about the original author - it was me!!!!