Game Coding - Projekti

[Pages:959]Game Coding Complete,

Fourth Edition

Mike "MrMike" McShaffry and David "Rez" Graham

Course Technology PTR A part of Cengage Learning

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Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition Mike "MrMike" McShaffry and David "Rez" Graham

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012930785

ISBN-13: 978-1-133-77657-4

ISBN-10: 1-133-77657-4

eISBN-10: 1-133-77658-2

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Dedication from Mike McShaffry

This book and my life are dedicated to my wife and my best friend, Robin

Dedication from David Graham

This book is dedicated to my grandfather, William Chace The potion was just sugar water after all

Foreword

by Warren Spector

For Mike McShaffry

Let me start by admitting a couple of things. First, I've never written a foreword for a book before. I've written books but never a foreword. Honestly, I usually skip right over these things when I'm reading a book, so odds are that no one is ever going to read what I'm writing here anyway. That makes it safe for me to move on to admission number two: I'm not a programmer. Never have been, and I fear, never will be, despite some valiant efforts on my part (if I do say so myself). I've done okay despite not knowing a blessed thing about programming. I'm not looking for sympathy or anything, but I am here to tell you that a day doesn't go by when I don't think, "Damn, if only I knew my z-buffers from my BSP trees!" If you're already a programmer, you've got a huge leg up on me when I tried to get into the electronic game biz! (And if you're not a programmer, do as I say and not as I do--learn to program ASAP. Mike has some advice about how to do that in the pages that follow. Pay attention.) Okay, so with those two confessions out of the way, I figure there's a fair chance any credibility I might have had is pretty well shot. Luckily for you folks, the guy who wrote this book has credibility to burn. Mike McShaffry (or "Mr. Mike" as he's known to most everyone in the game biz) is the real deal. Mike is a genuine survivor. He is a guy who can talk the talk because, Lord knows, he's walked the walk enough times to earn some talking time. Mike's experience of game development runs the gamut in a pretty remarkable way. He was there when teams were a dozen folks, and he's been around in the era of 20, 30, and 50-person teams. He's done the startup thing, worked for the biggest

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publishers in the business, worked on "traditional" games and decidedly untraditional ones--everything from Ultima to Blackjack, single player, multiplayer, online and off, and just about everything else you can imagine. When it comes to PC games, he speaks with the authority of someone who's worn just about every hat it's possible to wear--programmer, designer, project leader, director of development, studio head....

And I've had the privilege of watching him learn and grow with each new project and each new role. I was there when Mike got his first game job. I was one of the folks at Origin who interviewed him back in the Bone Ages, back in the 20th century, way back in 1990, when he applied for a programming job at Origin. (Seems like forever, doesn't it, Mike? Whew!)

He started out as "just" a programmer on Martian Dreams, a game I produced for Origin, but by the end of the project, he was the engine that drove that game to the finish line. The game wouldn't have happened without Mike. His drive, dedication, love of games, knack for on-the-fly design, natural leadership skills, and ability to combine right brain and left brain (to say nothing of his willingness to work crazy hours) drove all of us to work that much harder and ensured that the game ended up something special (at least to those of us who worked on it together--it sure didn't sell many copies!).

I honestly don't even remember if I ever gave Mike the title "Lead Programmer" officially on Martian Dreams, but he sure deserved it. The guy was a machine, working longer hours than most people I've worked with (and that's saying something in the game business). He also managed to do more and better work in those hours than any human being should be allowed to. It just ain't fair to the rest of us mere mortals. When Mike was on, there was no touching him. And he was almost always on-- after Martian Dreams, Mike did it again and again, on Ultima VII, VIII, IX, and a bunch of others. Scary really.

In retrospect, all those hours and all the hard work that seemed so necessary back in the days when we were all younger and more foolish than we are now was probably an indication that Mike, like the rest of us, didn't have a clue about software development or game design or much anything else. (Okay, we had a pretty good handle on the effects of sugar and caffeine on the human body, but that's about it.) We had to work so long and so hard just to have a chance in hell of ending up with something worthwhile.

Reading this book, I couldn't help but marvel at how much Mike's learned over the years and wonder how much more Mike--and the rest of us--would have gotten done, how much better our games might have been, if we'd had the benefit of the

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