Bryan and I shared a pizza lunch with Keith today. Like old times. Through Keith, Bryan and I started writing how-to computer programming books in the late 80s. I eventually ran out of words, but Keith and Jeff blossomed the informal group, dubbed the Coriolis Group, into Arizona's largest publisher—that is, until the trade book business took a nosedive. Keith has resurrected the company though and is publishing again under the name Paraglyph Press. Keith has some exciting new titles coming out.
Keith gave me a copy of one of Paraglyph's new books Game Coding Complete by game developer Mike McShaffry. It's all about the process of creating commercial quality games. An interesting feature of the book are little pull-out sections called “Tales from the Pixel Mines” that reveal some of the author's real-world industry experiences. Here's a sample from page 481:
Ultima IX was supposed to be the first Ultima in 3D. The problem was that no one in Lord British Productions (our producer group within Origin Systems) had any 3D experience whatsoever. We thought, “How hard could it be—we're all pretty smart.” What a horrible mistake! Back then we had to write our own software rasterizers, polygon sorting algorithms, mesh optimizers, and object culling. This was not a job for inexperienced programmers, even if we were somewhat brilliant. It certainly wasn't a job that had a specific ship date; and the project ran late. Ultimately, all the code we wrote was thrown out because DirectX and hardware acceleration finally caught up with our efforts.
Ah, such is programming. At least it's a way to get rid of all the old bugs.
Posted by Loren at July 29, 2003 08:19 PM