One of the dubious pleasures of working with console games is porting a codebase to more than one system. This not only involves dealing with wildly different hardware architectures, but often involves writing code that works with more than one compiler. GCC, MetroWorks, and Microsoft Dev Studio each have a significant number of quirks (e.g. different scoping of variables declared in a for statement).
The initial move from one platform to another is often painful, but tends to shake out a couple dozen bugs that are often difficult to find any other way.
This same pattern seems to occur when you take a system and use it in a way that it wasn't originally designed for. New tasks stress the code, finding new bugs and highlighting areas in the program that need improvement.
A properly structured piece of code that's maintained through this process seems to be strengthened, whereas a badly structured code suddenly sprouts #ifdefs and bizarre mutant data structures that should never see the light of day.
Not too long ago I was working on a baseball game (yuck) that had bits of header files with comments dating back to 1992. The project was a short timeframe (6-8 month) project that involved updating the game and porting to a new console. Significant parts of the game were awful, badly designed, crufty, and should've been taken out and shot long ago. However, the game ported to a brand new system without anybody ever shouting "rewrite". A lot of the credit for the smooth port does go to the publisher's awesome tools group, but the port would've easily taken twice as many hours if the core codebase hadn't already been ported so many times.
What company to you work for? If you can't "tell", could you alude in any way?
Posted by: Danne at May 6, 2003 11:48 AMI'd like to preserve the right to say very rude and sarcastic things without endangering the relationships my company has with various publishers, so I'd rather not say which company I work for.
I work for a 3rd party console developer in the Los Angeles area. I am doing PS2 development work on an unannounced project. There are no plans to announce my project at E3, although I will be wandering around the show floor all three days.
Posted by: Matt at May 6, 2003 12:59 PMWell put ;-) Look forward to seeing more updates!
Posted by: Danne at May 6, 2003 05:32 PMWelcome to the blog world. :-)
Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny at May 6, 2003 07:40 PMNice to see a blog by a console developer - and great to see that you're preserving your right to say very rude and sarcastic things.
Posted by: insin at May 7, 2003 02:02 AM