Hi John, I'm not surprised at all. When I initially came out with Monte Alpha 1 I slapped together a game in four months and put it out on the internet. While it was playable besides the bugs I quickly realized I spent most of the time working on that one game but did not break it up into reusable components or base the game on any common components. Which made the code not only a pain to upgrade but none of that early source code could have been easily imported into a new game. So what later happened I deleted the original source code and started over fresh with writing a fully qualified game engine, and then wrapped Monte around the common engine components. As a result it would have made any new games easier to create as well as upgrade since all of them would have used shared components. It is these components I am currently rewriting in Java 6. I am creating a Java SoundManager class, a game calculation class, character classes, world classes, etc that can be used in just about any game with little modification.Once I am done porting the engine code I plan to create a shared Java package for my games, and plan to offer this game package on the USA Games dev center for other game developers.
John Bannick wrote: > Thomas, > > Actually, we wrote the stuff over the several years before we released them. > > The base code was part of a HIPPA product we shipped years ago. > (Then the Republicans stopped enforcing HIPPA. Oh well.) > > Most of the game-level code was written over 2005 and 2006, which is about > typical for game development. > > But on 1 January, 2007, just after the ball fell, I turned on our Web site > and we were live with the first batch of games! > > Then it was a mad scramble to finish the rest in order to meet our promised > ship dates. Which I'm sure you can relate to. > > An interesting phenomena with respect to the games is that over the last > year we've had essentially zero bug reports. > Either people are buying them and not playing them, or they just work. > Though I know of a few non-fatal bugs that should be fixed before our next > release. > > One of the best programmers I ever worked with taught me to error trap > everything: arguments coming in, return values going out. > What that does is make it difficult (but not impossible) for me to proceed > without first fixing errors I've just made. > His code very rarely failed. > > Another excellent programmer taught me always to embed an event log in my > programs. > This made his code very robust because he could see its innards as they > worked. > > But the guys who've really shipped a lot of titles are Jim and Ian, working > by themselves. > I feel lucky to have some good colleagues here to code with. > > John > > > > --- > Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] > If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at > http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. > All messages are archived and can be searched and read at > http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] > If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, > please send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
