[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[Damion Schubert]

-----Original Message-----
From: J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com>
>Consider the following example as a programmer:
>
>  You have written a large block of code, say a hundred thousand lines
>or so for a project that is personally important to you.  Down in the
>bit that handles XXX the code gets pretty ugly.  It works, but its
>brute force, crude, inelegant, and generally just a hack.  Heck,
>you're not even very sure why it works (or doesn't break) even tho
>testing reveals that it does work and doesn't break.
>
>  How important is it to you to go "fix" that code?


Exactly my point.  I would want to fix that code.  However, unless
that code happened to affect something that I did later (I.e. I wanted
to add YYY which was similar to XXX), I would, at this stage in my 
career, probably put it off until some point when I was really, really 
bored.  This is because this now has financial implications =)

On Meridian (again =), our artists kept revisiting themselves.  We 
kept hiring new artists that kept disliking what the old artists had 
done.  I know we went through 4 variations of Giant Centipede art,
and 3 or 4 sets of player art (which is, you understand, hundreds
and hundreds of sprites to be painstakingly redrawn).  The most 
frustrating thing was that they wanted to redo the cities.    Now, 
granted, these cities were done when the company was Archetype,
we had a worse engine, cruddy tools, and no budget.  So 
they were somewhat of an embarrassment in the Quake 
age, and I'm pretty sure it came down to the fact that the 
Art Director couldn't live with those being in the game while 
her name was listed as Art Director.  So we replaced them.

All of these things caused complete and total outrage amongst
the player base.  We had to revert back to old player art.  Players
put up fan sites dedicated to the old Giant Centipede and Giant
Ant art.  But they were most outraged by the cities.  The way they
saw it, all that time we spent on making the cities look a little better
(and run a lot slower on our archaic engine), we could have spent
adding cool NEW cities, puzzles, dungeons and wilderness. And
they had a pretty good point, too.

>Billy Joe really doesn't care that his rockets in Quake don't cause
>the lava/sewage/water to fountain.  I'd wager that that very item is
>scrawled on some poor schmuck's notebook for Quake III.


I saw an interview with a designer for an upcoming 3D shooter
who said that his pipes WOULD react when shot.  Now, very 
noble, but my first reaction was 'That sounds like it would kill 
my frame rate in Death Match.  So no thanks'.  

--damion