I just released a mod I wrote for the Age of Conan game. I wanted to give it a name to set it appart and to lable it as mine. I already had Tortage.com waiting for the right project. So I wanted to use that site this time. I ended up with Kevmar's Tortage Tookit: Kill on sight list and combat stats / damage meter.
Looking back I can see that I over branded it. Adding my name and my website name into the title only made it hard for people to discover it. Once you know what it is, it is very easy to find it. But the initial part of the name (the part people see the most) gave no indication what the mod did. So telling people what the name is would only prompt them to ask what it does.
The title is shifting as I see the problems that I have already caused. KTT is the short abreviation I started with this week. KTT: KoS list and Combat Stats.
I should call it a damage meter, but that causes other issues. Alot more people would be able to find it. But the AoC community would bash it more. Alot of people in that community despise any influence that World of Warcraft is having on AoC. And this mod looks like it was something directly from WoW.
This is trial and error. It was a chance to lean a new lesson. I just went overboard with the branding. I think KTT will serve me well. You can already search for KTT AoC and its the top result. That is acceptable for this type of mod to have the game name also in the query.
If you ended up here looking for the mod, you can find it at my other site. KTT:Kevmar's Tortage Toolkit; Kill on sight list and combat stats / damage meter.
Sometimes a simple task in code can easily grow to several lines. If it is someone else's code, its common to want to recode it. You know things they don't know. You see a better way to reduce code. You forget about the things they know that you don't know. You forget about the time already invested in testing and troubleshooting the problem.
If you need a script to map a drive and rename it, how long would it take to write it? How long would it take to find the same code that has already seen production? I use that example because the task is simple. You could write that script in as little as 4 lines of code.
I did write that script. It started out at 4 lines of code. Now it sits at over 24. Those extra +20 lines came from the maintenance of the script. That overhead makes it more reusable, simple to use, and has solved the bugs that were only uncovered in production. Now that I write that, I'm not sure 20 lines is enough to handle all that.
But my point is the next guy will have this great desire to recode my script because it can be done in 4 lines of code. Starting fresh means that sometimes you give up all the research and testing that came before. Willing to repeat the same bugs that have already been solved. Willing to resolve all the same problems that have already been solved.
I should have found a script online, but I wanted to do it myself. Some lessons are worth learning yourself.
