[atari_eric]

Originally posted by deccan:
(True Fact: I was browsing around the MOO3 forums earlier today and one of the programmers was saying that they couldn't fix the part of the diplomacy system that generates the famously cryptic speeches made by AI controlled empires because it's a black box that nobody understood anymore.)

Okay, I am a Games Programmer, and this is just wrong. It is one thing to "inherit" another game company's code and not make heads or tails of it; it is quite another to generate your own code and declare it a "black box" of confusion. How this was tolerated is anyone's guess (I know how it got there - someone here mentioned a lack of leadership. I've seen someone posit that organizing programmers is like herding cats...) I guess there were no "bosses" to punish this sort of behavior...

This concept, to me, is just infathomable. I would think it better (junior as I am) to delete and rewrite from pseudocode rather than keep such a malfunctioning piece of code in a project.