[The_Fury]

I can totally relate to this sort of thing and way of thinking. For those of us who have started our games from a point where a lot of development has already taken place, "AKA Stock Codebase" the initial charge of development usually proceeds with addition after addition of code on top of pre-existing code bloat. That initial focus of development seems to be driven by "people want more" scenario that players say they always want and what other developers sometimes say in forums like this.

I know at least 2 iterations of my own code that has suffered from this very problem. Grand ideas that never see the light of day due to being to complex, time consuming or there is just not the man power or drive to see them to completion. I think this very problem is also why so many projects die so early in the development cycle, just the overhead of building a 3000 room feature rich world without even thinking of code changes, to go with it, is enough to kill most. Building is hard and very time consuming, and code changes that also mean building changes and additions can mean that things just are never fully implemented.

So over the last few years i have come to realize that size is not as important as cohesion and that this goes for code as well as content. The motto i have since developed with my smaug derived codebase is, If i will not use it, gank it. I still come across stray bits of code that i have no idea why it was ever there, partly implemented smaug features and other unknown entities. After working out what its for, if i do not see any use of it for my game, it gets removed. At a guess i may have removed around 40,000 lines of code. The game compiles faster, takes up next to no space in memory and runs just fine with out it.

That old saying comes to mind, "You cannot be all things to all men" and neither should our games and our code try to be either.