Last night, I was looking at the brakes on my wife's car. I had heard some noise coming from the wheels last weekend, so I took advantage of some time and took the wheels off to look.
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At the suggestion of our Technical Director, I added some tattle-tale functions to the particle system. Full on logging of all particle add requests. I also added some functionality to track some other trouble spots. Also, in discussion with artists, they asked for a few minor debugging features. All these little minor features add up to create a VERY powerful system that will let us know IMMEDIATELY what is going on in the particle system with just a few button pushes.
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These are 2 separate events that really illustrate 2 levels of engineering prowess.
The particle debugging all came at the request of a more experienced engineer, and I didn't honestly see the reasoning. However, now anytime anyone comes at me with a particle question, I'm able to easily debug it for them on their machines, without having to go back to mine and step through the code to see what is going on. This saves TIME, which we all know is MONEY. Being able to easily tell what is wrong is great. But what if...?
The brake pads can't really tell you that they are worn out, but the little tattle-tale doo-hickey can. A simple bent strip of metal that sticks out the depth of the usable brake pad and drags on the rotor tells you that the brake pads are worn out.
What's the difference? The particle changes allow me to figure out what went wrong. The brake pads tell me before things go wrong.
Something to think about when designing and implementing new things...
As I was sitting there pulling off the wheels to verify that the noise I heard was what I thought it was, all this dawned on me. It's amazing what we can learn from other disciplines.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
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