Program Design, Demo

There's an annoying issue when designing a program; you can't see the result of the desig until you are done. But sometimes, in order to make a design decision, you might want to see what you have working, get a feel for it. It's an iterative process. There's a reason so many programs minimize or ignore the need for design: designing is boring, compared to actually coding and creating something that works.

There's always the temptation to design as you code and fix things later. Then when the code is crisscrossed with hacks made to get it working, you feel like scrapping it and starting over. I'm going to try to fight that urge and do things right. That means doing a few tests as I design, settling on methods and structure, and leaving the actual program for the future. That's where Demos come in.

I have designed a high level overview of the program. A bit of the class hierarchy, penciled in the data structures I plan to use and the like. I'm close to having the parts in place for the Rendering Engine to actually have something to render. What I'm going to do is make a quick mock-up of the program, with a sparse implementation of everything I talked about until now, and try to get it all ready for prime-time.

I'm not going to actually render anything. No OpenGL calls or anything like that. This is meant to make sure that what I have works, and identify any needs I forgot about. It's going to be a console only application. So let's have a quick rundown of how the program should work:

This is what we're going to test

Once we decide on the scope of the demo, we program it. Gotta jump in Code::Blocks for this....