That pretty much defines 'art' I think. The artist is compelled to see the vision through, it isn't about the money or the time or the cost. I am quite impressed he stuck it through.
A long time ago (1983 to be precise) I started rewriting Empire, a curses based turn based strategy game (Hi Walter!) because I was convinced I could make it so much better and I had spent a lot of hours playing it. When I was at Intel working on a high end graphics chip I joked with one of the design engineers that it would be cool if you could see little armies fighting but we both agreed there probably wouldn't be enough CPU / graphics capability to do that in real time, at least not in our lifetime :-).
While I never finished my efforts (-1 for me I guess) I learned so much along the way, I bought Dunnigan's excellent 'How to Make War' book which was the bible for wargames at the time (and to some extent still is) and tackled path finding algorithms, and automated forces deployment, and strategic evaluation with limited vision, and all sorts of really interesting problems/puzzles that each offered up a ton of interesting insight. Bottom line it wasn't a waste of time for me, even though I have nothing to show for it.
I love that Adam stuck with it and got it done. Very inspiring.
Similar story, I got hired by a game development company to make a strategy game involving an aircraft carrier, a ton of aircraft and all kinds of boats and characters. When it was done it was a mini multi-tasking operating system, it taught me more than any project that I'd done up to that point. And the fact that it all played out in real time on a screen made it very easy to see if it wasn't keeping up.
This was on an ST so definitely not a slow machine and yet there were quite a few tricks required to keep it all moving smoothly with close to 100 objects on and off screen.
Pretty close. The game was called FlightDeck and the publisher was Aackosoft. It was a bit earlier though, 1980s, I'm a bit hazy on the exact date but it would have to be somewhere around 1988 or so.
Here are some shots from the MSX version (which was made a few years earlier by an absolutely awesome programmer called Steve Course).
What an amazing feeling it must've been. I absolutely LOVE hearing these developer war stories from 80s and 90s, although 90s more because I am a 90s kid.
It definitely makes me feel that today's average devs are spoiled with all the innovations that have taken place...and still can't roll out a hit.
If you haven't seen it already, you might enjoy reading "It's Behind You" by Bob Pape. It's about how the game R-Type was ported to the ZX Spectrum back in the day.
I had a similar thought when I watched the video. Actually, I thought about the concept of 'Quality' as introduced in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two moments in particular:
- the consistent lighting part: the guy is making this giant epic thing, so you'd think he would cut himself some slack on what really looks like a detail (I wouldn't have noticed it, especially not in this type of game). And yet, the guy absolutely obsesses over it because, you know, that's how it feels right.
- the 'aging' part, when he explains how he kept upgrading old sprites or levels as his skills improved so they "would match up to his standard".
And the best part is that the guy doesn't come off as being arrogant or anything. Just a dude, making the game he would like to play, and making sure it's as good as he dreams it to be. Inspiring.
>That pretty much defines 'art' I think. The artist is compelled to see the vision through, it isn't about the money or the time or the cost. I am quite impressed he stuck it through.
[...]
>I love that Adam stuck with it and got it done. Very inspiring.
I agree, and I also like how Adam was realistic in describing the burden of seeing the project through completion as an albatross.
There are several side projects I work on that I've never been able to finish, but I don't feel the psychological burden of them. It's hard to know if that means I'm just not committing hard enough to completing side projects, or I'm appropriately moving on at the right time. Either way, maybe one reason I don't feel like there's much 'artistry' to my output is that I'm not willing to take on that heavy of a burden.
Just food for though. Inspiring stuff. I found the PuzzleSolver program included in the download just as interesting as the game, btw.
Called "How to Make War" and it describes the mechanics, the theory, and the variables that impact the prosecution of warfare. The Wargames book was, in my opinion of course, a derivative which attempted to re-contextualize the information from HtMW into something more directly 'wargame like' but, again in my opinion, it left out too much to be useful even for that.
When I was at Intel working on a high end graphics chip
I joked with one of the design engineers that it would
be cool if you could see little armies fighting but we
both agreed there probably wouldn't be enough CPU /
graphics capability to do that in real time, at least
not in our lifetime :-)
You really didn't think that would be possible in your lifetime in 1983? I'd think that would have seen pretty feasible by then, seeing as there were games on mainstream computers doing that not even a decade later.
Heck, I bet you could get something resembling that working on a 1985-vintage amiga.
I realize that this is an off the cuff sort of comment but two things stand out, first you have give credit to the Amiga as it was stunningly better than anything else when it was released in 1984, and as wonderful as it was, Populous (perhaps the first game will small isometric animated battles) didn't come out until 1989. In 1983 running Microsoft flight simulator on the CGA card was state of the art :-).
Since I was at Intel at the time neither one of us expected computers to get 1,000x better than they were at that moment in time (the 80286 @ 10Mhz woo hoo!) I was driving a BARCO 1024 x 768 RGB monitor that cost Intel $3,000 to purchase, they were predicting it would be under $1,000 in the next 10 years or so. Its hard to have little animated pieces running around recognizably on a pixel budget of 15 x 15 and perhaps 8 bits per to select out of a color pallet of 4096.
So the photo realistic stuff we saw at Siggraph we didn't expect would be 'real time' in our lifetimes, certainly not at anything close to affordable a price. And yes, we were way off base, but that is the nature of things.
It's funny how being closer to the reality and more informed about the technology can mean one's guesses about the future are more pessimistic than people making pie in the sky guesses (think scientists versus sci-fi authors).
I'm not directly involved in tech/hardware and I'm imagining full on reality-quality 'virtual reality' beamed into people's brains within 20 years. I imagine those in VR would scoff at this, but I'm kinda hoping I'll be closer to the truth ;-)
Hah, being a grad student in machine learning I feel this quite strongly. The popular science perception is that computers are already close to being smarter than us (BS articles about Turing tests don't help...), whereas it seems like if we truly reach computers that "think", it won't look anything like what we're doing now.
> It's funny how being closer to the reality and more informed about the technology can mean one's guesses about the future are more pessimistic than people making pie in the sky guesses (think scientists versus sci-fi authors).
Bill Gates has an interesting quote about this phenomenon, for which I forgot the exact wording... it says that you are always wrong as to how fast things will occur, but you are also wrong when you think stuff will not be available for a very long time. There's many examples of such assumptions being wrong now and then.
Seriously, the PC took years to become State of the Art when VESA local bus freed us from IBM dictating the game with E/ISA and ceeding control by trying to force MCA on the world.
Yes, and in fact Gordon was still Chairman of Intel, but the thing about exponentials is they are always S curves. The trick is knowing when they are going to taper off and go flat :-)
A long time ago (1983 to be precise) I started rewriting Empire, a curses based turn based strategy game (Hi Walter!) because I was convinced I could make it so much better and I had spent a lot of hours playing it. When I was at Intel working on a high end graphics chip I joked with one of the design engineers that it would be cool if you could see little armies fighting but we both agreed there probably wouldn't be enough CPU / graphics capability to do that in real time, at least not in our lifetime :-).
While I never finished my efforts (-1 for me I guess) I learned so much along the way, I bought Dunnigan's excellent 'How to Make War' book which was the bible for wargames at the time (and to some extent still is) and tackled path finding algorithms, and automated forces deployment, and strategic evaluation with limited vision, and all sorts of really interesting problems/puzzles that each offered up a ton of interesting insight. Bottom line it wasn't a waste of time for me, even though I have nothing to show for it.
I love that Adam stuck with it and got it done. Very inspiring.