Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Every job has its good parts and parts you just have to slog through. Game program-
ming is no different. First, game programming can be extremely frustrating at times.
Many before me have argued that programming games is the most challenging form
of programming there is. Bad things are a matter of perspective; some people find
these things challenging, while others find them burdensome. You
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ll have to judge for
yourself.
s not uncommon for a game programmer to do something completely new and try
to hit a deadline at the same time. I
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m not talking about a modification of a data
structure to fit a certain problem; I
m talking about applying experimental and theo-
retical designs to a production system that meets deadlines. On Ultima VII, one
programmer wrote a 32-bit memory management system that was based on a little-
known Intel 486 processor flag and hand-coded assembly, since there were no
32-bit compilers or operating systems we could use. On Ultima VIII, one of the
low-level engineers wrote a multithreaded real-time multitasker two years before
Win32 went beta. On Ultima IX, the graphics programmer figured out how to
make a software rasterizer appear to pump 32,000 textured polygons per second on
a first generation Pentium. Everyone knows what Ultima Online did
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—
found a way to
get every Ultima fan playing in Britannia all at the same time. I can
t even begin to
talk about the innovation that had to happen there just to get this system to work.
It would be one thing if this stuff were all research, where results come when they
may and the pressure is bearable as long as the funding for your project is there. A
game project is different because the schedule is relentless. For all the media press
about how late games are, I
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m surprised that you see some of them at all, given the
fact that so much technology has to be created and somehow the game has to be fun
all at the same time.
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Richard Garriott Uses Jedi Mind Tricks
Technology isn
t the only thing that makes game programming hard. Game
designers will push you farther than you ever thought you could go. I
remember very well a conversation the senior staff at Origin had with Richard
Garriott about the world design for Ultima IX. The team was pushing for a
simple design that was reminiscent of the old Ultima games
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the outdoor
map was separate from the city maps. This was a simple design because each
map could be loaded at once, and no complicated map streaming would be
required. Richard didn
—
t go for it. He wanted a seamless map like Ultima VII.
This was a much harder problem. We knew going into the meeting that if we
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