Revisiting old code

This past week I began working on Mercury2, which will be almost complete rewrite of my first game engine Mercury. So far I have only worked on the render window. While working on it i decided to look at my old code from Mercury1 to try to figure out how I had done it. When looking back at old code, its amazing to see how much your coding style changes and improves over the years. Its been over three years since I wrote the windowing code for Mercury and it certainly shows.

Looking at my old window code, it was clear I didn't have any understanding of what I was doing when I wrote it. Actually a lot of it was taken (and giving credit to) from NeHe lesson 1 and was modified to be a little more flexible (in my mind at the time). The result worked well, but the code was a pretty convoluted. I decided it was best to sit down and review my old code to try to figure out exactly how it was supposed to work. So with a long of review of my old windowing code, and some heavy reading of MSDN documentation I developed a much more solid window system.

Moving forward in the project I think it will be difficult to properly design the project knowing I have large amounts of "old code that works" that I could fall back on.