![]() Also, it would have been a stretch to put what would have been a Buddhist monk into a quasi medieval European game world, as used in "Legend of Faerghail". Chronic underexposure to Wuxia movies accounts for the fact that we settled on the "Friar Tuck" image of the monk in "Legend of Faerghail" (we did know our 1938 "The adventures of Robin Hood" by heart, though). ![]() When we picked the character classes to use in the game, the monk had to be on the list. What worked well on the Amiga had to be adapted for the PC, and you probably saw the side-effects of this approach play out. Porting the game to the PC amounted to rewriting the game code, both because of the quirky 'C' language development platform, and because the code was not particularly portable to begin with. and which had its own peculiarities to account for. I recall that reLINE had to test the game on a special IBM PC compatible machine manufactured by Tandy, which had both a significant market share in the U.S. How you programmed the graphics hardware varied greatly by manufacturer, and since there was no operating system to help you along, you had to use low-level operations to get it to do something useful. ![]() Back in 1988/1989 the term 'compatible' in "IBM PC compatible" had claws and teeth. The PC development platform itself was by no means uniform or stable either. Not only did Holger have to port a game which was not intended to be portable, he also had to learn programming the system from scratch. Holger Heinrich at reLINE software took on the challenges of porting Legend of Faerghail to the PC, and from what I recall this was an exceptionally difficult task. The development tools in particular were immature: the Atari ST had an excellent Turbo 'C' compiler, but the 'C' compiler used on the PC by reLINE software had so many quirks that porting code from the Amiga almost always amounted to a rewrite. By comparison to the Atari ST and certainly the Amiga, the PC was not a mature platform, because it lacked an operating system. reLINE software had already acquired a development system, with AdLib sound card and EGA graphics. This was at a time when the IBM PC compatible platform started to become relevant as a gaming platform, both in Europe and internationally. This proved to be challenging on many levels: the game was not intended to be ported when designed, game design was still evolving and ongoing, and at reLINE software nobody had the necessary experience in programming the PC in the 'C' programming language. The game itself was designed and "prototyped" on the Amiga, and at some point had to be ported both to the Atari ST and the "IBM PC compatible" platform. We all were hobbyists/amateurs, who were self-taught and learned the craft through writing software for and painting on the C64. Legend of Faerghail was the first, only and last big commercial game the three of us collaborated on. What originally started out as a more modest product evolved into a multi-platform game (Amiga, Atari ST, PC), in two different languages, using unproven technology (reLINE software wrote all their games in assembly language Legend of Faerghail was written in 'C'), by an unproven designer/programmer team. Not only were the three of us pressed for time, as the final exams were approaching (we passed - working on the game did not have a negative effect on our marks), our producers and collaborators at reLINE software must have been tearing their hair out, given the complexity of the game. In retrospect, that type of approach must have made it harder for everybody who was involved in making the game. At that age you can move the world, just by sheer force of ignorance and sticking to your guns.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |