Rewrite less-maintainable areas of the source code

[Jarvellis Rogers]

Some areas of the FFEA source code have been described as “almost unmaintainable” and it has been suggested they be cleanly rewritten. While time needs to be taken to identify which areas of the code are the least maintainable, the following are some such areas:

• I/O and parsing, due to the hardcoded XML tags and functions. Initialisation is spread through many functions in many files.
• world.cpp
• Collision handling, as it is simultaneously abstract and also has a lot of unnecessary duplication.
• Collision detection.
• The Python code due to being written in a C++ style and with structural problems (of course this could be solved during the porting of Python 2 to 3).
• Simulation box.

This task was suggested in the evaluation report for FFEA 2.7.2.

[Jarvellis Rogers]

It has also been suggested that the FFEA development team create a set of coding standards for developers to avoid problems like this in the future.