Delta Force's programmer was really boss (Daniele Gaetano), a physics guy turned coder if I remember correctly. He rewrote Voxel Space to be true'ish 3D and not fakey 2.5D. He explained the innovative backtracking he had to do on the ray caster to make that work, implemented mipmaps in the voxels, very very clever guy. One of the friendlier guys I've known in videogames.
I did the first version of the matchmaking for the network play in Delta Force but didn't make it into the credits because I quit before it shipped. My psycho coworker built a custom web browser(!) that integrated directly with my from-scratch matchmaking server. At least they let me work in C for that project; most everything else I had to do for them was assembler because that was not a "sissy" programming language. That server code was by-far the coolest thing I wrote for many years afterward.
Unfortunately, my server code couldn't handle more than like 32 concurrents because the Windows NT 3.0 kernel would BSOD with more. My (extremely grumpy) manager and the Sega Saturn coder called me a few days after I had quit to ask how the code worked. I suspect I left data in the socket buffers too long (was trying to batch up my message broadcasting work at regular intervals) and the kernel panicked over that.
I recall learning later the TCP/IP stack was homegrown in NT by Microsoft at that time and they licensed a good one for later versions, so I can't be blamed, it wasn't me! :D
I was just the lowly build-master/installer/utility developer, but I got tapped for testing and debugging and performance because I was just a sponge for coding knowledge because I wanted to be a game developer so baaaad at the time. I didn't get to do any of the game coding, and my experiments were just fruits of conversations with benevolent sages.
The reason facing east-west (or was it north-south, now I'm unsure) made such a difference in framerate was the color and height maps were ray marched in straight lines up from the bottom of the screen to the horizon. This meant you were zipping through the color map in straight lines, wrapping around to the other side if the ray went far enough.
When those straight lines lined up with the color and height map (north-south), life was good (and when a ray marched up a sheer canyon wall, life was VERY good.) But, when those straight lines went perpendicular (east-west) to the color and height map, you were blowing through the L2 cache constantly and going to main memory very often. I imagine on modern hardware these cache misses wouldn't amount to much measurable time, but on a 386dx with 8megs of RAM, the impact was very clear.
Novalogic was the only programming job I ever had where I got my own office with a door. ;) When I was with them, they had a policy of one game developer per game which I never saw again. Maximum cowboy coder energy, good times.
Oh this is cool. I did something similar with a modded Launchpad by programming GOL on it and converting the positions by column and row to octave and degree and then outputting MIDI to a synth.
> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.
I was an admin on a huge wire mod server as a teen and it changed my life :). I might not even have gotten into software, don't even want to imagine that life
It's easy for me to quickly idolize the authors of books and blogs I have read—yours included (thanks for writing GPP)—and it's often I think I fall into the trap of feeling like I need to dedicate all my free time into practicing and learning software and computer science topics.
I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice reminder that even those authors have things outside of software.
One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.
> One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.
I got a soft spot for SUSE. In the late 2000s, Novell partnered with my highschool to teach a certification class, so it became the distribution I cut my teeth on if you don't count my time playing with compiz window effects on a free Ubuntu live-disk in junior high.
I've come across my box of Palms a few times and had limited success getting them going. Seems they don't like being in storage for almost two decades. Really loved my Palms back then.
I have both a PalmPilot Professional (with serial) and a Palm m500 (with USB), the latter is a lot easier to pocket, but the USB support is horrible in modern OS. I keep wanting to get back in to Palm dev. I even managed to get Pila to compile under macOS Catalina a few years ago.
I also have a stack of V-Tech Helio's, which is a PalmPilot clone. I don't remember why I ended up with 3 of them, but I got them to reflash the OS and never got around to it. Their whole OS source code is available online. The compiler is not easy to make to work these days though. DJGPP and I think 16bit.
I remember there was another story here about Google returning bad results for what to do for a particular medical emergency. The page had a list of "Do"s and "Don't"s, but Google had grabbed the list of the "Don't"s and displayed it as the immediate results.
That's fascinating to find out! I grew up a fan of Nova Logic, so I'll have to pay attention to this the next time I revisit their games.
Was this done for Comanche or did you also do this for Delta Force?
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