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From: orpheus@reed.UUCP (Aaron Semplers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games
Subject: Re: Risk
Keywords: color, graphics, sound, harsh
Message-ID: <15722@reed.UUCP>
Date: 21 Nov 90 21:04:54 GMT
Reply-To: orpheus@reed.UUCP (Aaron Semplers)
Organization: Reed College
Lines: 61

|    Chris Russo writes:
|    To tell you the truth, I've yet to see any really good action
| games for the color Mac. And you know what? I don't think I ever will.
| The Mac just can't animate worth a damn! I'm really tired of these
| slow flickery graphics... We'll never have large smoothly scrolling
| screens, continuous background music, a decent input device. I could
| cry when I watch even the poorly written Amiga games.

     Its funny that the Amiga, hybrid product that it is, has such
good graphics. It seems to me that the Amiga advantage is the number
of hacks who have been able to afford it over the years, unlike Macs.
     I am quite certain that the Mac is capable of the graphics that
you describe. I am not familiar with the Amiga, but I do have some
degree of experience programming the Macintosh. We have the technology.
     Have you ever noticed that if a game comes out for the Mac, nine
times out of ten, that game is black and white? And probably lame?
As far as I can tell, there are three major reasons for it.

 {1} Most of the tweaks that write really good games are using classic
Macs, at school, with no practical color or stereo capabilities anyway.
It makes it easy, pretty fast, and lowers the common denominator.

 {2} Even if you have color and stereo hardware, there are many, many 
obstacles you have to overcome in order to take advantage of it. 
The guys at Apple who support developers do a damn good job, but there 
are still so many little things you have to do right that nobody ever 
happens to mention. These are little things that take a long time, 
even for an experienced programmer with a decent development system to 
figure out on his or her own. And then, you have to write the code
necessary to support the classic Macs as well as the latest.
     So, once you overcome the Mac problems, and whatever problems you
have with all the math involved to do sweet graphics and sound, there 
are secret, undocumented problems in one (or more) of the more popular 
compilers that take forever to get confirmed long distance.
     It begins to seem that in writing a game, life has become a game.

 {3} Assuming that after several months you have gotten this far, 
you are a well-versed Macintosh programmer with months of notes and a 
good understanding of the problems you will face as you write the game.
If you remember what you set out to write in the first place, the
thought of overcoming all of those obstacles again, in the context of
the original application, can be mind-boggling.
     It almost becomes more appealing to write the next Illustrator 88
with everything you have learned or maybe some wild screen savers, 
anything but assembling it all over again.

     I set out to top a game for the IBM PC called Jet Fighter a long 
time ago. Granted, it was an ambitious project, but it turns out that
what I thought would be easy was very difficult and vice versa. 
     I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm over the hump with graphics, going 
into sound once I get the docs for the new Sound Manager, but anybody 
else would be starting from scratch.

     By the way, the reason I said that 32-Bit QuickDraw was just as
important as the low cost machines is that it can reduce the time it
takes to do really hot graphics from a year or more to a month or more.

     orpheus@reed
    "It's all becoming clear to me now..."

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