The Importance of Commenting Code

When you think about it, it seems fairly obvious. Comments can clarify and explain the purpose of any of your code, from variables to functions to entire namespaces.
Throughout Collapse, I decided to implement a Doxygen commenting system. Doxygen is a command-line program that generates documentation from code comments. It's really handy and clean, and though I do not see much use for it in terms of Collapse because I'm not actually releasing some sort of documentation, it provides a uniform commenting style that encourages me to comment everything well.

The reason I decided to do this is because I realized how unclean and confusing my code was. Here's an example line:

float angle = DEG(atan(abs(y - this->GetY()) / abs(x - this->GetX()) * 1.0f));

I had to look at this for a good five minutes before realizing what this actually did; it determines the angle between the player position and the mouse location. It's after this moment that I realized some sort of commenting system was essentially, and thus began re-write #3.