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Joel Billings -> RE: Quick update on development progress. (6/4/2004 9:55:04 PM)
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ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980
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ORIGINAL: GBirkn
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ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980
Well, I;ve rewritten almost every Grigsby game I've gotten the source code to over the years, including PACWAR to fix a litany of bugs and AI stupidity.....
I didn't know they released the source code! What sort of a license is it under? Are there any plans to release the code to UV, so we can contribute some help that might eventually find its way into WITP?
The old Apple II games were easy. The game disks contained the AppleSoft basic code right on them, all you had to do was boot to ProDos and extract it and go from there. I got the PACWAR code from one of guys that did some work on the Matrix reissue of the game. And for those who thought Grigsby was such a great programmer, all you have to do is read the "What's Changed" list to see just how bad the original PACWAR really was!
Gary is a TREMENDOUS game designer. Pure genius. But he's NOT much of a programmer, at least, he's not anymore. The way he used the same data array in the old Apple II game for different game entities was quite clever at the time when we had 128K of memory to play with and those tiny 360K floppy disks. But in this day and age of 1GB ram and 300GB hardrives, and myraiad of toolkits, an ever maturing C++ ISO standard and tremendous compilers, using the same general techniques now is not only not warranted, but not even desirable at all, because that type of coding is a bug waiting to happen, and it doesn't scale well at all.
Gary would be the first to admit that he is a relatively lousy programmer. That's one big reason we have Keith in 2by3 and one of the reasons Matrix loans us Mike Wood. Keith is an excellent programmer that is willing to learn new programming techniques. In our new World at War game we are using a brand new engine and Keith has set up the game to run from data files, allowing non-programmers like myself to control huge chunks of the rules of the game. It's also our first truely windows friendly game. As a guy that never programmed past my knowledge of Basic and my Pursuit of the Graf Spee game in 1982 on the Apple II, I enjoy hearing Keith and Mike discuss how Gary still thinks in Basic terms and programs C+ as if it were Basic. It's that old dog thing. Of course you are also correct in saying that Gary's a tremendous game designer. He can spin a formula like no one I've ever worked with.
As for Alpha/Beta timing. It's very misleading. I've worked on many games where you couldn't really play the game until a few months before release, and the Alpha and then Beta timeframes (of a playable game) were about 2 months each. In this case War in the Pacific started with a known engine (UV). Alpha testing started 19 months ago. I'd say by 7 months ago the game was very playable with 90% of the game in. We spent a lot of time since then getting the scneario data files as correct as we could (a huge task) and adding many new features that players wanted and our testing indicated should be added. Bugs were constantly being found and fixed, but the game was very stable this whole time. Beta was so late because we kept wanting to add new features and new interface items. Risky, yes, but each one seemed worth adding and we were still working on the scenarios, art and manual so we figured why not keep adding them. We finally cut things off and called ourselves at gameplay Beta back on April 19. That means we've had over 6 weeks of Beta, very similar to old SSI days, although we rarely had so much playable Alpha time.
Are there going to be bugs, you bet. This is way too big and complex for us to get out all the bugs. Who knows what player's will find. We won't know till it gets in their hands. We are however saying that we don't know of anything major at the moment, and the minor things we know about our very minor. Testers have been happy with the way the game has been playing for along time so it should be fun out of the box unless their is some system incompatibility issue out there that we are unaware of. We will anxiously await word of problems that players find, and will try to fix them as quickly as we can identify "real" bugs and find fixes that don't break more than they fix. I hate to think of the thousands of "bug" reports we will get that are not bugs buy just people not understanding the complexity of the game and how things execute. Even if we had the perfect manual that explained everything there would be many bugs found that weren't bugs. Just yesterday a tester posted something that I thought was probably a bug until one of the other testers figured out it was just a misunderstanding of the role of AS vs. MLE ships (and I've been editing those very sections of the manaul this week). Just too much to keep in your head.
Well, back to work. We're just about there.
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