[gameprogrammer] Re: My game
- From: Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2005 13:26:20 -0700
Seriously, those are good questions! I am wondering as well now...
On 9/25/05, Bob Pendleton <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 17:57 -0700, Kevin Jenkins wrote:
> > Evan Stone wrote:
> > >>I'd love to hear more about your AI - what sorts of things you had to
> work
> > >>on...
> >
> > Getting Up is the largest game I've worked on. It's about 20 million
> > lines of code with about 50 people working on it.
>
> To put that in context, the largest system I have worked on was about
> 3.5 million lines of code, and that was the entire X Windows system. The
> Windowing system used on UNIX and Linux machines.
>
> Can you fill us in on the tools that were used to manage that code base?
> how are changes managed, what is the build system, do you use automated
> testing. What is the bug fixing/tracking system like?
>
> Bob Pendleton
>
> >
> > As a result, most of what I did was read code and fix bugs written by my
> > predecessor or in other systems. This is unavoidable when you have that
> > much code and that many people. Nobody understands an entire system and
> > not a single person who wrote any of the original systems still works at
> > the company, which is not unusual in large companies.
> >
> > Getting Up has a lot of what we call "Special Navigation" in it, such as
> > climbing ladders, going across balance beams, climbing walls. A lot of
> > my time was spent working out how to get through these things, which can
> > be very complicated in some cases. For example, we support jumping from
> > a ladder to a pipe to a balance beam to balancing up to a wall climb.
> > Every one of these situations needs custom code.
> >
> > Special navigation relies on physics for correctly detecting the
> > navigation, level design for correctly implementing the meshes and
> > pathnodes, and script for correctly interpreting AI commands. Because
> > of the high degree of interdependency I had to know all of those systems
> > well enough to debug any of them.
> >
> > I think when most people think of AI they think of the visible parts of
> > what you see in the game, such as which attacks enemies throw and when
> > they block. But actually that is mostly script. The AI programmer
> > provides the framework and it's up to others to provide the details that
> > the player sees.
> >
> > The AI programmer is very important because he deals with many systems
> > and is the go-to man when people have problems. But the job isn't all
> > that exciting, or at least not for me. Mostly I just fix bugs and tell
> > level designers or scripters what they did wrong when something doesn't
> > work.
> >
> >
> > ---------------------
> > To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html
> >
> >
> >
> --
> +--------------------------------------+
> + Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer +
> + email: Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx +
> + web: www.GameProgrammer.com <http://www.GameProgrammer.com> +
> + www.Wise2Food.com <http://www.Wise2Food.com> +
> + nutrient info on 7,000+ common foods +
> +--------------------------------------+
>
>
>
> ---------------------
> To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html
>
>
>
Other related posts:
