It’s always disappointing to do a lot of work, only to have to undo it again.

I’ve spent the past few hours working on modifying MMORPG Tycoon 2 to keep just one copy of each building model in memory.  At the moment, each respawn point that you place (for example) stores its own copy of the respawn point model.  This means that memory grows rather a lot, as you place more and more respawn points.  The standard solution to this situation is to load the model just once, and then to draw the single model in lots of different places in the world.

In practice, though, actually making that happen can be a little tricky.  I’d gone a fair way toward implementing it, before finally realising that the way I was doing it was ugly and difficult;  it was going to be a nightmare in the long run.  I certainly learned some things from doing it, but it’s always a bit disappointing to end a session of coding by undoing all your changes, and putting things back the way they were before you’d started.

At least I do now have a path forward, and I’ll make a little progress along this new direction before it’s time to sleep.  But I would have liked to have some visible results tonight, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.

Oh well.