Games Programming

Programming

Games

  I began Game programming, mostly for economic reasons, however I have always been a keen games player. I now realise that far from being the easy option, coding games is actually the most difficult form of programming, since the routines have so much to do, in so little time.

  I had admired the coding in some games greatly. In the early days, I admired most the games which cut corners. The PC was never designed for games playing, and getting such a general purpose machine to run games was never going to be easy.

  When I first set out to code a game, I set the graphics board to VGA and started. No way. Upon reflection I should have noticed that all the other games were in a much lower resolution, and that there was a reason for that, but in the end it took a screen test to prove it too me. I was shocked, my 286 could barely write an eighth of the screen, in the allotted time.

  Thus I understood that the mechanics of game engines was to get the actual machine you were working on to sing, not to try to write a symphony for a Mouth Organ. Work out the tricks and then base a game around them.

  During the learning period I of course had to 'Reinvent Wheel' a few times, Mode X and CodeSprites had to be 'invented' since the techniques were 'top secret' in those days, (now that they are 'old hat' we have other secrets).

  I also saw how the software houses were 'cheating', eg. by not waiting for the vertical retrace... this causes a very messy scroll, but the games players never really noticed it. They wouldn't say, "Hey that's smooth!", heck, no, but they would say, "Hey there's loads of nice graphics in that game". Nice graphics which could only be printed up in time due to absence of retrace waiting.

  Capella.

  My favourite game at the time was DUKE NUKEM (1), and so I decided that a massive cribbing session was in order, and the game I wrote, called Capella, was indeed very similar in many ways, (though, its not as if computer games are ever original in any respect).

  The whole thing turned out to be a learning process, since it was too late to be published, however you can see that I was considering it, by the company banners on the screen...

Now of course it is well out of date, but it is still cute, and so I may as well post it here... You can download it, play it and if you like it, (forgetting about its out of date-ness) you can email me and tell me so!

Download Capella! Its EGA heaven!

View the title screen!

The game will run on a 286 or better PC. Take a look at some screen-shots. There are only three levels surviving but if you can finish it I'll be very impressed indeed, I can only just do it!

  Current work, and the future.

  Without a technology blasting game engine, you are wasting the people's time. I have therefore been thinking for a very long time. Now that I have two 'impossible' game engines, the games themselves can be written in no time... ...(3 years later: "Maybe I underestimated a little!!!")

  The future, in terms of my work in Games, is those two game engines. Once they are out of my brain I should be able to leave gaming and go on to something else. [Unless another good idea rears it's ugly head!]

A page from James David Chapman's website. Located at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/ Site mirrored here at: http://www.j.chap.btinternet.co.uk
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