Mike Wood
Posts: 2095
Joined: 3/29/2000 From: Oakland, California Status: offline
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Hello Gentle User...
I spent 4 months of 18 hour days, seven days a week, changing code for SPWW2. When I went to work on SPWAW, Andy Gailey took over the SPWW2 project and is coding his heart out on that program. More importantly, we have the source code. So, although SP2WW2 was a hack, SPWW2 was not "hacked". It was, and is being "recoded".
quote:
Originally posted by Seth:
SPWaW is a total rework based on SP3, but a lot of the code is completely new. SP2WW2 was more like a hack of SP2, with very little structural/programming change.
I have now spent 10 months on SPWAW, coding to the exclusion of all else in life, in an effort to include as many ideas as possible which I received from the design team, the play test forum, the TGN website and this web site.
I believe another answer to the original question might be that SP2WW2 was the addition of WW II art to the SP2, modern battle game. There was minor hacking with a hex editor. SPWW2 was a rewrite of the SP2 game, which converted the modern battles game to a WW II game. SPWAW was a major rewrite of the SP3 graphics engine which converted the game to a Windows game and from platoon level to squad level. I finished coding the program this morning at 5:58 a.m.. I changed tens of thousands of lines of code and added 143,000 lines of new code. At this point in SPWAW, the graphics engine is the only original code remaining from SP3.
After going to E3 this week, Gary, David, the old PacWar design group and I will be starting full time on War in the Pacific: Struggle Against Japan. I will be coding that as I have SPWAW and before that SPWW2. But, as we will be selling the game, I will be able to buy some beans and coffee.
In about a month, once we have gotten a list of undiscovered bugs, complaints and missing features desired by the end user, I will be working on a patch for SPWAW.
Not to be too sensitive about this, but neither I nor Andy have made, or will be making 2 cents from our programming efforts working on Steel Panthers games. And, the programming skills required to do this kind of work are actually worth quite and bit of change.
I have poured my heart and soul into SPWAW, turning down two very lucrative offers from major game publishers, in favor of destroying my health, giving up dating and socializing with friends, going to the movies, walking in the sunshine or any thing which would interfere with the coding schedule I set for the project. So, please, when throwing around terms such as "hacking" in the same post as SPWW2 or SPWAW - "Smile when you say that, stranger".
I most sincerely hope that you enjoy the game as you, the end user are the reason I have been working on the project. I have not posted very often, as that would take time from my work and Paul has been doing an exceptional job in posting.
Michael Wood,
Matrix Games
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