Ultima Online: Samurai Empire Diary #2

RPGVault continues their Ultima Online: Samurai Empire diary series with a second installment, this time with lead engineer Tim Keating discussing coding challenges. An excerpt:
Often, we're faced with the dilemma of whether to untangle a particularly snarly call tree or axe it in favor of a rewrite. Tempting though it might be, the rewrite isn't usually the right answer - it means replacing proven (if cryptic) code with code that has never been tried. We try to strike a middle ground, re-factoring hard to follow code segments, adding comments to obscure sections of code when we unearth them, and setting time aside to rewrite systems (for example, our new guilds system) when they simply aren't architected to allow us to expand them the way we want to.