Well this is less of a progress update on Black Engine and more of some mindless ramblings and thoughts.

Since I presented Black Engine at the end of my Independent Study it has grown by over 3,000 lines of code. So what is diffident you might ask? Nothing. At least thats what the casual observer would see. It still looks exactly the same.

Under the hood though there have been a TON of changes. From the asynchronous logger to the configuration class to the centralized texture manager. Even smaller things like a much tighter and cleaner build environment and finally a working Linux build target, the kinetic resource system was greatly improved in concept and design. More recently outward appearances have finally started to change with the GUI classes coming along. These are fairly close to completion too.

But I just read something I've been mulling over. "Perfect is the enemy of good". I've been wondering if I have been guilty of this. Obviously very little work has gotten done this month, but I have been researching the dark corners of C++ learning the language more and more intimately. And tonight when I began coding I started applying that knowledge. Going through the class hierarchy altering every class with explicit constructors and removing their default constructor I never wanted in the first place.

See, sure this is better, and in fact this is what I had wanted from the beginning but hadn't known about the explicit key word. And my code is now cleaner and tighter. But what if I had spent that time finishing the last of the GUI classes. What if all the time and love I've put into pre-existing code since the tech demo was spent on new code. Would I have my next public release done already? Probably, but who knows. Really at heart I am a perfectionist. And I try to practice a strongly iterative development approach so I actually get project finished. But I ALWAYS find my self going back and tweaking every little thing, these projects become my babies, my works of art. So maybe perfect is the enemy of good, maybe it does kill many promising projects. But I need to find a way to use my perfectionist tendencies to create exceptional projects that still actually get finished. Because, whether I like it or not. I am a perfectionist.