gadgetmind

I just watched a Youtube video of species1571 playing CC:GM with this mod and it looks *stunning*. Congratulations to everyone who's kept working on this game to make it what it should have always been.

It's interesting that a few threads hereabouts have mentioned Battlezone. A few of the Bohemia guys have said that Carrier Command was partly responsible for getting them into games development, whereas for the Realtime guys it was Battlezone. We played the original arcade game in Leeds university's union bar and I could play on a single 10p for hours. I loved nearly everything about the game, and as a result, the first game we ever released was "Tank Duel" back in 1984, and it was a pretty blatant copy of Battlezone. It sold well, but I was disappointed; did you notice I said "nearly everything"? I wanted to drive off to those mountains!

I demand that CCGM be ported to the Nintendo Wii! And none of this kowtowing to the keyboard-obsessed PC crowd! I want to be able to do everything with my Wiimote (just one, obviously) *and* I want proper Mii support so I can populate my mantas with those cute little guys and gals.

Yes, I'm involved, but not heavily involved: probably as involved as you guys are now but starting many months earlier. Personally, I do think some aspects of the controls need to be better, but this has been improving version by version. I'm sure that well-considered and specific suggestions will be taken onboard, whereas saying that it's all the fault of the consoles isn't really too helpful. Games have pretty much always had to be multi-platform, so developers have always had to work around different architectures, different levels of performance, different amounts of storage, and different input methods. This does cause headaches, and it is the job of the developer to try and give users on each platform a great gaming experience. Remember, the BIS guys are also fans of CC and they want the game to be great!

Hey, I was 25, I never even expected to live this long!

Well, coming back to this code after nearly 25 years, I'm having to try and work it out! YOYOY didn't we add just a few more comments ...

Way back then, networking PCs was difficult, and modems were rare, slow and expensive. Just as we were finishing the ST version, we did see Midi Maze, but I'm not sure we considered adding anything like that to Carrier Command.

The enemy carrier tactics were rather different between 68k and x86 versions of the original, with the latter being far more advanced. I'm sure that BIS can (given time and tweaks) deliver AI for the enemy carrier that's far in advance of the original, particularly for "carrier to carrier" battles. Whether the original source will help or hinder I'm not too sure, but it is now to hand.

It sounds to me like they have perfectly captured the learning curve of CC 1988. :D

To be honest, it never even occurred to us! I wrote both the ST and the Amiga disk routines, and we even went on to licence them to a few people. The ST used a fairly standard layout, but I did skew the sectors to let us load a whole track in just over one revolution. The Amiga didn't use sectors: we put all the odd bits (with clock bits interleaved) in the first half of the track, and then the even+clock in the rest. We did this because we could then use the blitter to both split and combine the data and to insert/remove the clock bits. Of course, I then had to visit the disk duplicator to work out how to write the parsing code for their fancy disk making machine! Yes, way back in my youth. I signed the Carrier Command contract the day before my 24th birthday and I'm now over twice as old! Hey, I wonder if there will be another remake when I'm 72!

Out of interest, which version of Carrier Command were you playing? I guess I need to take that feedback on the chin, though some detail doesn't match my recollection and I'd have to do a fair bit of source code reading to see how things worked - or at least how they were supposed to work! Getting the final gameplay balance right isn't easy, and we were certainly short of both time and resource to do this. Our only test resource was ourselves, and towards the end, a couple of Rainbird people, but they weren't 100% on the CC project by any means. This is why I'm so pleased that Bohemia have been prepared to put the work into this area for the remake, and some might even have spotting modest slippage to the shipping date from time to time ...

It would be trivial to add this to the 68k versions, but I'd also have to rebuild the assembler from source (yup, we wrote that too!) and get into ST/Amiga emulators.

The cheat modes were quite different between the x86 and 68k versions. The 68k used keypad keys but the x86 has an additional options screen in addition to some different cheat keys. From what I can tell, the 68k versions didn't have the "zoom to enemy" feature, but TBH you're best looking at it on the PC anyway as the tactics were just so much better.

We were trying to play as fair as we could, but the enemy carrier strategy/tactics and face-to-face battles were the last thing we did in the 68k versions, and it didn't get as much polish and testing as we wanted. The PC and Mac versions (the latter with code back-ported from x86 to 68k) did benefit from this, and lots more fixes, tweaks, and additions. I'll try and find time to dig down into the 68k code and see what I see. BTW, if you want to see what the enemy carrier is up to, if you turn on cheat mode, you can see the enemy carrier on the map and (from memory) zoom to it by holding mouse-right as you click on the centre-on-carrier button.

Yup, I found the water depth code for the player and you're probably right that the enemy doesn't have this. Wow, does memory fade, or what! I'm working through the PC code and haven't been deep into the 68000 code as it really wasn't anything like as advanced regards strategy and tactics.

Hmmm, OK, so the enemy carrier does cheat. It tries really hard to work within its fuel reserves, and always tries to make it to a red island if it can. However, if it's all gone wrong, it limps to the nearest island even if it's out of fuel. If its engines are also damaged this can be quite a limp as it goes at half the speed that engine state would dictate. The code for the player's carrier is pretty much the same but rather than half speed for no fuel it's zero speed. What's puzzling, is that my memory was that the enemy carrier's normal top speed was about the same as for the player's carrier, and the x86 code seems to agree. Maybe I need to check the 68k code as it was very different in this area?

Yup, 1st release on the ST had a variety of bugs, including the enemy carrier driving onto islands. As we'd been grabbing a few hours of sleep under our desks every now and then for several weeks, our coding wasn't quite as precise as it could be. Rainbird wouldn't let us change the version number when we fixed that one as they didn't want to give people new disks, but we sneakily added an extra space!

I'd have to check the code to make sure, but Graeme was a bit of a purist (versus my "bash it until it works" pragmatism!) so I doubt he'd have let it cheat.

Yes, the supply lines worked for the enemy's islands and carrier in just the same way as for yours. This was the primary strategy element of the game.

I'd have to read the code to answer this in detail, but it's worth noting that battles where the player is present are conducted in 3D with collision detection and flying objects, whereas not present battles were handled more like dungeons and dragons with "hit points" and the computer equivalent of multi-sided dice. When the player arrives at an island (during a battle or otherwise), everything gets "unpacked", and an island model etc. is created, then when you leave, it all gets "put away" again and is just a bunch of compact numbers. A whole load of this stuff, and in particular the enemy carrier's attack strategy (when choosing targets, during "dice" battles and in 3D) changed greatly between the 68k versions and PC version, with the better stuff being back-ported to the Mac 68k version.

Given the hardware and tools we were working with, and our "bash it into shape" approach to design and implementation, it's amazing that any of our games were ever finished nevermind still being remembered with any fondness. Perhaps there is merit to shooting from the hip at times?

That did worry us a trifle when we launched "Tank Duel" in 1984, and we also worried about Lucas when we launched "Star Strike" in 1985. I'm not sure you could creep under the radar so easily nowadays. BTW, all of our old Sinclair Spectrum content is available on the Spectaculator iPhone speccy emulator, and this will shortly include Carrier Command. Yes, CC on a 4.77Mhz Z80! I earned enough royalties from this last quarter to buy *three* bottles of cheap wine, which isn't bad for something I worked on nearly three decades ago. I'm looking forwards to decade four!

What is the flight speed of an unladen Manta? :D

Well, don't you know how to make a happy man feel very old! :) Ian

Yes, it's me, but I've been continuing to lurk as I can't say much due to confidentiality agreements. Let's just say that I didn't stop grinning for days after I first played CC:GM. They really have done a magnificent job of taking the fundamental concepts of CC and creating an up-to-date game around them. Everything is recognisably CC, and you get the same feeling of space, freedom, and having lots of toys to play with, but with first person action that gets your heart racing. I need to put more hours/days into the game (first I had to build a gaming PC, then my wife dragged me away on holiday) as I've really only scratched the surface by taking a couple of islands, but every indication is that this game could easily surpass the original in both success and influence on the future of gaming.