JEO 26/46
   ||  BattleSphere News
   ||  By: Scott Le Grand and Mark Santora
\__//  legrand@tesla.mbi.ucla.edu, santora@earthlink.net
//// BattleSphere Countdown
[from Scott Le Grand's Official BattleSphere Countdown page <http://www.
best.com/~varelse/sphere.html>.]
Last updated 1/16/98
There are now:
*** 2 ***
coding days to the completion of Battle Sphere.
Here's what I have left to do in those 2 days:
General stuff
1. Final Music Assignment
What am I doing right now?
10/26/97 - Alright, I'm breaking my own rules. Battle Sphere has been
in playtesting for the past 3 weeks. It's still not out of the woods
yet though. We've found tons of strange ways to cheat AAtE (well Doug
mostly, I'm much too predictable a player), a few bizarro crash bugs
(which get harder and harder to isolate as they become rarer and
rarer), and some just plain dumb mistakes. I thought you guys deserved
to know what's up with us when I noticed that it's been 3 weeks since
I last said anything.
11/12/97 - Was off on a mission the weekend of 11/7 and returned with
a nasty fever and 13 new bugs. Killed six of them last night, know how
to kill 4 more, and need to think about the remaining 3. They're
getting really niggly now which is good because that means the game's
stable enough for Doug and Mark to actually notice such things. I'm
still REALLY stumped about one of them though...
11/23/97 - We've been through two drafts of the game code since the
last update and we've managed to find bugs in each edition. A new
edition was sent out tonight: we will see what comes of it.
12/01/97 - Astute observers will notice that an item just disappeared
from the to-do list. While we are still waiting on the final
soundtrack, all 10+ Easter Eggs are now activated in their final form.
That's the good news.  The bad news is that we have a weird controller
lockup in BattleSphere mode that needs to be fixed and by now you know
what that means about the countdown ARRRRGH! During a lull this
weekend, I wrote up Rev 0.01 or so of the Win95 graphics engine. Our
ships look pretty good under OpenGL, but specular highlights really
suck and I'm not quite sure why (Darklight Conflict has them and they
look pretty good there). I was starting to investigate this when BAM
in came the BattleSphere bug which is tonight's nightmare.
12/04/97 - Just a program note, BattleSphere is now 358,758 lines of
code.  The biggest program I ever worked on before this topped off at
about 40,000 lines. Anyway, I think this helps explains why the damned
thing has taken so long. Last summer, we were at 157,000 lines or so.
In other areas, drunk drivers really really really deserve to die.
Thomas Rodman, who had been waiting patiently for BattleSphere's
release, was killed by a drunk driver on Thanksgiving. I am angry,
sad, and depressed about this senseless random death. A car is a
lethal weapon. Why do we not treat drunk driving like discharging a
firearm in a crowd?
12/15/97 - OK, Steph went to the hospital last Friday and was out that
evening, boy was that a scare! Meanwhile, there are some dangling
threads left, but things are finally coming to a close (assuming a
little problem we encountered with Doug's Jags involving the
networking of 3+ players is just his hardware and not a game issue).
When Steph gives us the final soundtrack, the above final list item
will be removed and the clock finally moves down to 2 coding days.
Between playtesting the thing, I'm studying the state of the art of
polyhedron detail management and collision detection, real-time
physics, and network optimization. We got a lot right in this Jaguar
game well ahead of its time and some of its algorithms will survive
intact into the PC edition. In fact, we used some tricks the id guys
didn't discover until Quake 2. Hopefully, the schedule for PC Sphere
will be a lot shorter so we're still ahead of the curve by the time we
release the thing. Who knows? I do know that it's getting really tough
to do these things right as the demands for realism increase (I could
kvetch for an hour about Quake 2, but since they did an incredible job
on the graphics engine and we haven't even shipped our first game I
think I'll just shut up now :-)). What's promising is that the game
mags are starting to catch on at last about what a bunch of stinkers
the space games of the past 2 years have been and how it's time for
someone new to enter the genre. Now if only we can get some funding...
1/16/98 - The EEROM hardware issues have been resolved, we are setting
up the final configuration and await only the final soundtrack. The
game has been in playtesting for 3 months now and very few bugs were
found after the initial avalanche. We are closing up and preparing for
production. That will be a whole new adventure. Oh yeah, the problem
with networking mentioned a month ago had to do with one of Doug's TVs
giving off lots of RF and messing with the network cables. This may
turn out to give some grief to people going for 8 console networks,
but it works for us, so it can work for you, too.  We've never seen
this happen with 2 player networks.  Expect a tongue-in-cheek section
in the manual on ambitious BattleSphere networks...
... catfish@wingnet.net or http://surf.to/troy >460 hits!
--- JetMail 0.99beta22
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