Re: Revising games (was Return to Zork)

[erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)]

Howard Sherman (lordrandom@erols.com) wrote:
> Chris Lang wrote:
> > >I'm absolutely certain Activision hasn't revised the game, anyway.
> > >Restarting a shut-down game project is *hell*.
> >
> > Especially if it's a graphic adventure, with live actors and voices
>
> I think you hit it on the head.  IF is art.  The new Zorks from Activision,
> while good, weren't produced with that level of dedication.
> [...]
> The old guard of Blank, Meretzky, Berlyn, etc. would think nothing of
> reloading the source, coding the mods, and re-compiling and playing with ZIL,
> etc. to make sure that Revision 97 (or whichever) would be better than the
> one before.

No, no. It has nothing to do with art, dedication, professionalism, or the
size of one's hackerly dick.

It's *technically* a nuisance. More so with multimedia games, but this is
true of any project.

A project is not just source code. There's a huge pile of personal
expertise. I don't mean brilliant programming ability, I mean the base
knowledge of how all the damn fidgetty parts fit together. In a multimedia
game, that knowledge is split up among dozens of people -- sound people,
rendering people, video people, compression people, programming people, CD
assembly people. Does Activision even *employ* everyone who worked on RTZ?
Almost certainly not; people switch jobs a lot.

Recreating all that knowledge from a pile of archive CDRs is immensely
time-consuming.

Infocom maintained Zork until it broke up. That's a continuous process,
done by a continuous team. But then people *left*. Put all the people back
together, give them a few weeks to remember how it used to work, and it
*might* be restartable... after several *more* weeks. Include time to fix
all the bugs that they introduce because they forgot little details.

(Go ahead, ask Mike Berlyn if he'd be willing to fix some Suspended bugs
if he had access to the ZIL source code. I dare you. :-)

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."