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discipline

I’m not disciplined enough! I have too many ideas!

Each time I add a piece of basic infrastructure, which I do because I foresee its valuable uses, I feel overwhelmed by the valuable uses and start thinking of new ones. Then I need to write the ideas down and give them an initial evaluation. If there’s a better plan, shouldn’t I switch to it? I keep changing my plans, and it is slowing me down. Well, I always change my plans a lot, but now I’m doing different stuff that (at least psychologically) allows more room for changes.

When I implemented unit clustering, I had a plan f0r how to use it at the operational level (so I put it in a new class OpsBoss) and a plan for how to use it one level down for squad control tactics. Having seen my code in action and thought about it more, I find a lot more uses, including everything that touches on pathing. I also thought of a more complicated but clearly better plan to use it for squad control.

I’m still thinking through the new plan. While that is percolating, yesterday I added another bit of basic infrastructure, target tracking so I can keep tabs on who wants to shoot at me. And I wrote its first use, reacting to spider mines. Obviously it has many more uses; it should factor into combat micro throughout... along with other information that Steamhammer doesn’t collect yet. The possibilities are slowing me down just by being so numerous. It’s easy to get distracted, and it takes time to set priorities.

I’m not disciplined enough to keep my to-do list short and manageable!

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Joseph S Huang on :

Easy stuff first? mineral locking is an easy win and only a couple LoC.

Jay Scott on :

It’s more than a few lines of code to get the full benefit, though: It simplifies strategy calculations a lot, because you always know exactly how many drones you can support. Implement it, rip out the drone limit option, retune expansion decisions, check opening timings since the relative rates of mineral and gas mining are changed—see, too many ideas! Not that you’re wrong. It is on my list, and I can skip most of the extras for now.

Joseph S Huang on :

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

https://www.nextavenue.org/why-you-shouldnt-be-perfectionist-work/

Jay Scott on :

Obviously a flawed understanding of perfection. :-)

Arrak on :

Impressive foresight. That is pretty much what I did. I implemented mineral locking myself after I did a massive rework of the worker manager structure in order to try to make workers capable of fighting. The mineral locking code fit in nicely afterward, then I experimented with tweaking the timings and expansion. It did not have super substantial benefits - some timings were 10-20 seconds faster, but low saturation was better for most situations -- otherwise, it would make too many drones, mine out too quickly AND also fail to expand to make up for it, or otherwise make massive, risky worker transfers. In low saturation, the benefits from mineral locking are hardly noticeable. I conclude that in order to get the full benefits, we would also need to implement Nydus canal usage to decrease the transfer penalty of workers to new bases after a base mines out...

Antiga / Iruian on :

There are a couple of authors that are fairly organized and others that really have no organization at all. I think a good way to sort is by expected ELO gain per hour invested in a project combined with an attitude of... if it takes less than 5 minutes, just fix it. Have your list of things to work on then attached an estimated time required to them and then guess how much ELO you'd get by completing it. Multiplying your expected gain in ELO by the number of hours gives you something you can use to compare projects.

Arrak on :

Heh, I feel bogged down in the details as well. I had a "to-do" list of features about 3 pages long, most of which involved tremendous reworks of Arrakhammer's structure that would pretty much destroy all compatibility with Steamhammer, and which were not guaranteed to provide the versatility that I wanted. On top of which, I respect your work and wanted to preserve some compatibility. That was part of why I had stopped working on it for so long. I can't shake the feeling that there's some crucial insight to the "zerg tactics" revolution that I'm missing, some framework that might bring together all these seemingly random bits and pieces -- and make things like doomdrops and flanking seem less situational.

Dan on :

To-do lists for StarCraft bots only grow and never shrink. The PurpleWave to-do list at last check had 400+ items on it. Prioritization is really the biggest power an author has.

Marian on :

Regardless of the project I'm working on I would say there are three type of motivation phases:
1. thinking (actually you don't have to be near your PC, the best ideas might have come out of unexpected places like bathroom)
2. fast results - pure motivation is to see things working as fast as possible
3. refactoring, optimalization, perfection - fast result might work, but might also produce a lot of bugs, bad performance and poor code that needs to be improved (this phase needs a lot of focus and effort)
Keeping a todo list of all ideas is a good way to go and just pick what you actually feel like doing - don't pressure yourself.

McRave on :

I think this is exactly how I developed. I find I get ideas at the silliest of times, I aimed for fast results and started refactoring/optimizing recently.

I keep a very small todo list of the critical items, and never pressure myself to do them.

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