Darren New wrote:
> I have often wondered how much of the development effort of a game goes 
> into
> 1) Overall concept
> 2) Level design
> 3) Art and sound and motion capture and etc assets
> 4) Portable (like AI) coding, and
> 5) Engine-specific (DirX vs OpenGL) coding.
> 
> It really would seem to me that porting the graphics to a different 
> platform for a relatively large game (like, say, Half-life) would be a 
> fairly small part of the problem.

[Just noticing, but... Halflife actually runs on "a heavily modified 
Quake-2 engine".]

Anybody wanna take a guess how many LoC the Quake-2 engine is? (I 
*believe* it's been open-sourced now... or is that the Doom engine?) 
Warp might know the answer...

Surely if you wanted to build an entire game completely from scratch, 
building the game engine would be a *relatively* small part of the 
problem - but it's not trivial by any stretch of the imagination. 
(Otherwise *I* would have one by now!)

>> Given how painfully difficult it is just working out how to *use* the 
>> Win32 API,
>> the chances of somebody correctly implementing a clone of it seem 
>> vanishingly small. 
> 
> It doesn't have to be identical functionality. It only has to be 
> "correct."

No - has has to be "incorrect" in exactly the same way that Windows 
implements it incorrectly. Every bug and glitch has to be precisely 
replicated, or some lump of software somewhere that depends on those 
bugs won't work right.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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