Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 6:26 pm Post subject: Heh.
James wrote:
I know someone who had something to do with the youngblood game (that was never released), I'll point him in this direction.
Hee! That would be me. Thanx, James.
Youngblood was something like 2 years in development when the lead programmer quit. I was brought in to salvage the project.
After years in the business, I have a lot of horror stories, but Youngblood takes the cake. Most of my tales of terror involve object-oriented programming gone horribly wrong ("so what if it doesn't work, it's object-oriented!") but Youngblood was something else entirely.
I designed and wrote most of MechWarrior 2. Youngblood, a 2D tiler, was nine times the size and had six times as many modules. There was one spot where there was an "#ifdef Playstation", followed by a bunch of code, and then an "#ifdef Macintosh" (ditto), and an "#ifdef Saturn" thrown in there somewhere, and SIX THOUSAND LINES DOWNSTREAM was the "#endif" with no comment.
It probably took months to do, and none of it was even getting compiled.
I did a quick couple of tests. At least ninety percent of the comments were wrong, because all the modules were just copied from one another. He'd write some horrible buggy thing, and then (this is not an exaggeration) make 27 copies of it, one for each character.
When I first tried to compile it, MSDev gave 3500 warnings.
I checked one global variable ("dx"). It was declared once, then extern-ed sixteen times with six different types. The concept of a ".h" file had apparently not entered his fat skull.
The gentleman left for Activision, where he worked on I-76, which was my MW2 engine. We had lunch with him occasionally; he'd go on about how cool the engine was but somehow it never penetrated his black-hole stupid head whose initials those were in all the fricking comments.
Youngblood originally took a minute and a half to load to the title screen, and would leak several tens of megabytes. Pro Tip: don't null a pointer before you free it. Especially in 27 different modules.
He wrote a scholarly article on Gamasutra about the making of I-76, and professes to be interested in fuzzy logic and neural nets.
Joined: 26 Aug 2003 Posts: 4192 Location: Oakland, CA
Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:50 pm Post subject:
Ha, I love horror stories like this. Say, did you save any media from anything you worked on that didn't come out? Maybe we can work an article out of it, we're obviously in need of something new around here.
Ha, I love horror stories like this. Say, did you save any media from anything you worked on that didn't come out? Maybe we can work an article out of it, we're obviously in need of something new around here.
I don't have much, personally, but I know some people that probably do. I'll see what I can dredge up.
Youngblood's installer (a preliminary version, of course) showed a little animation as it loaded. It was an eight-frame loop featuring Col. Whatever-his-name-was, Badrock, and anal fisting.
Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 5:25 pm Post subject: Conditional
Repo, did you work on the original MechWarrior 2? The DOS version I mean.
It sounded like Youngblood had too many conditional compiler directives. But about ".h" files, when I took C in college, my professor never went over what those were. I had to learn on
my own what an ".h" file did, and how it was used.
Also on a semi-related note, Toon-Disney at 10:30pm is now showing X-Men from the early 1990s. Good stuff
Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 4:31 pm Post subject: Re: Conditional
SlyphGlitch wrote:
Repo, did you work on the original MechWarrior 2? The DOS version I mean.
It sounded like Youngblood had too many conditional compiler directives. But about ".h" files, when I took C in college, my professor never went over what those were. I had to learn on
my own what an ".h" file did, and how it was used.
Also on a semi-related note, Toon-Disney at 10:30pm is now showing X-Men from the early 1990s. Good stuff
Yeah, I wrote most of Mech 2 and came up with the concept. The DOS version was the same as anything else, only when the Pentium came out they replaced the fixed-point math with float.
It was accused of feeling like a flight simulator -- which it did, because that's what it was. I made flight sims (the real kind) for years before the aerospace crash of '92 flipped me into the strange world of games.
You are precisely correct about the compiler directives. The kicker was that if "Playstation" was true, "PC", "Saturn", "Macintosh", etc., weren't, so there were many thousands of lines that were never even compiled because of the nested #ifdef-s.
The company is still alive and slowly rebuilding, but during the time I was there (about 20 months) they went from about 275 people to 11.
One trick they pulled was taking the money Nintendo gave them for a concept demo, and using it to finish a project for Sony that was badly behind schedule and over budget. The Nintendo project was therefore wretched, neither Sony nor Nintendo was pleased, and both refused to do business with them thereafter. Whoops.
The saga of Mech 2 is written up (the first third of it or so, anyway) on my personal forum on Portal Of Evil news. It got really, really weird (which is to say: really, REALLY weird) before it was all done. It involved illegal substances, hundred-hour weeks, telephone taps, a project manager whose sole qualification was that he'd been a game tester a few years before (so he clearly new more about 3D than I did), theft, subterfuge, and general mayhem.
Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 12:36 am Post subject: Wow...
Wow, I learn something new everyday. Yeah I remember seeing MechWarrior 2 "Pentium Editon" on Wal-Mart's shelf back in the day. I never knew it's story was so screwed up.
Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 576 Location: confirmed
Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 9:14 am Post subject:
Mech Warrior 2 is one of my favourite games EVER!
Repomancer, you're a freaking saint!
Back in teh days, when I had an old 486dx66, w/8mb ram and a 400mb HD... Mech Warrior 2 was like "WOWOW" with it's mighty consuming of... heck, 210mb!
Over 50% of my mighty HD...
That game, + Ghost Bear Legacy and Mercenaries have given me endless hours of entertainment.
(And they still do, I've got the soundtrack for MW2 on my MD player and I've brought the set with me to the base I'm at at the moment, so I can enjoy them on my laptop every now and then)
Anyway, as for the different versions:
There's the regular version of Mech Warrior 2.
A "Pentium Edition" (also seen it listed several places as "windows 95" version)
And there's the "Titanium" edition, which I freaking lack in my collection :-(
Titanium = 3DFX version, I think it came in special "locked" versions too... Restricted to certain graphic cards.
Say, do anyone happen to know a place I can fetch the "Titanium Trilogy" box-set?
Joined: 16 Jan 2004 Posts: 286 Location: Murfreesboro, TN
Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 8:53 pm Post subject:
Repomancer wrote:
After years in the business, I have a lot of horror stories, but Youngblood takes the cake...
Yeah, I wrote most of Mech 2 and came up with the concept...
The saga of Mech 2 is written up (the first third of it or so, anyway) on my personal forum...
Thanks for sharing with us about Youngblood! I look forward to the article. Hehe, yeah, I'm always up for a good horror story too.
Mechwarrior 2 is an awesome game. I'm not much of a PC gamer, but I sure enjoyed the Saturn version. I'll have to read the development saga sometime.
Akuma Sephitaro STOP POSTING AND MAKE SARDIUS A CAKE
Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 45
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 4:36 pm Post subject:
Hm, I owned MechWarrior 2 for the PS for a short while... (I didn't like it, much.... Was too slow for me at the time, I kinda wonder if I'd be any better at it now... )
So the YoungBlood game was going to be on Playstation and all that other stuff, too? I coulda sworn it was just a PC game... (Or maybe the preview was based on the PC one.... )
Now I just wish I knew where those screen shots and info were...
Say, do anyone happen to know a place I can fetch the "Titanium Trilogy" box-set?
I'm 95% sure I've seen that down here, at a local Office Depot: the only place in Mexicali where you can buy ten year old games for the price of a next-generation PC game. I know I've seen Mechwarrior 2 boxes there, at least.
I'll go check when I can. I'll have a chance to go on January 3, if you don't mind waiting a bit.
Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 576 Location: confirmed
Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 1:24 am Post subject:
If the box says 3DFX or "Titanium edition" on it.
Then it's the Titanium version, I'm particulary trying to find the "Titanium Trilogy" box set (long box with all 3 parts/releases of the game)
I wouldn't mind puking out some money for it, as I only seem to find the titanium edition of Mercenaries on ebay, and even that one goes for way too much money, even without a box and manual :-/
Posted: Sat Sep 08, 2007 10:40 pm Post subject: Re: Gen 13 (PSX, N64, or Saturn)
Xanathis wrote:
Was flipping through some old Wizards and saw talk of a video game planned for the PSX, N64, and Saturn based on the Gen 13 comics. Out of curiosity, whatever happened to the game?
Wow, how did I miss this topic the first time? Well, since it's been necro'd...
I actually remember playing a PC demo of one of those games many years ago. Now it's making me wonder if I still have the CD it was on.
Heh, after about 2 minutes of searching, it turns out that I do. I've got a Youngblood demo on one of those old CDs that came with Ultra Game Players, from early 1998. Huh.
The Gen-13 game is ringing a bell, too, for some reason, but I don't see any mention of it anywhere.
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