why so much code?

So, when I posted that handful of posts the other day, someone said, "That's a lot of code. Why are you sharing so much code?"  They might have been joking, but it made me instantly self-conscious of how ugly the code looked (I made some changes to the page layout, but there's only so much that can be done).

Admittedly, the last bunch of posts aren't the best advertisement for Hugo.  On the positive side, the vast majority of it is something a new author has no need to be aware of.  I mainly show it now and here just as a snapshot of Roodylib's current development and also to give clues to future authors looking into any of these things.  Still, maybe it couldn't hurt to try to share more game code (you know, stuff that is fun to look at).  We'll see.

Some of these things I've been writing about are difficult in any language.  Some of the code in the last few days handled spacing, and new Inform 7 authors, at least, are often getting spacing wrong.  Still, I know Inform (and probably TADS, too) are a bit more powerful when it comes to grammar, and they probably have code to make some of the other things I've mentioned a lot easier, too.

This all got me thinking about the things I'm proudest about concerning Hugo's current state.  Here are some of them:

• I really like my PrintStatusLine code.  I'm glad I've set up a system for really-configurable status lines that look great in all sorts of environments.
• I'm also proud of the work that's gone into "newmenu.h."  Menus look great in the regular terp, glk terps- even simple DOS/Linux terps.
• There's also my "configlib" extension, which takes various configuration-file-writing extensions and lets them piggyback into one saved file (you can easily add your game-specific configuration thingies to be saved, too), saving the author the headache of figuring out how things be saved when only one part of it changes.

Of course, there's not much I can do to make the actual writing of Hugo rooms and objects easier or more appealing.  It still just comes down to people who want their game code to be code-y but not too code-y (at least, that's one of its appeals for me).

As far as where my code needs the most work, I'd still like to polish "newconverse.h" up.  That's the extension that allows for several types of conversation menus.  When it works, I think it looks great and really has a lot of possibility.  Still, whenever I apply it to a new game, I always have a hard time getting it started so, yeah, that needs to be more user-friendly.