It's nice to have a game that sells a million copies.

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!