I bet he did PI planning for a week. Created 132 user stories. Decided on 2 week sprints at a velocity of 27 story points. Had daily 1 hour stand-ups. Weekly 2 hour sprint retro meetings. Per sprint a 3 hour sprint review meetings and a 6 hour grooming session with his cat. Not to forget the bi-weekly 2 hour sprint refinement meetings. And each sprint had a 4 hour backlog meeting on the potty. All by himself.
Are 1 hour (or anything close to it) really a thing that happens? No wonder people hate on scrum then. Itâs called a stand up because no one wants to stand still for more than 10 minutes and would like to get out of there asap. đ
I bet its looked something like:
- Developer in large company was frustrated with how much time was spent just communicating rather than doing.
- Comes up with a new system for effective communication and organization.
- Doesnât get much traction at current company because of inertia.
- Eventually starts his own company or joins a smaller startup where they are open minded because they havenât developed their own system for that yet.
- Less time spent communicating and organizing because itâs a smaller company but confirmation bias gives credit to new system.
- Many companies adopt âprovenâ system.
- Large companies end up in same or worse boat because things still need to be communicated and disagreements still need to be resolved through discussion or orgazational power.
Though just a guess, since my only âexperienceâ with âagileâ has been seeing people complain about it. Plus experience working in a large enough team to have experienced the communication problem and to understand that a part of it is with so many meetings that are often irrelevant to the work any individual is working on, the default often ends up being tune most of it out until itâs their turn to speak, so they often end up missing relevant stuff anyways and any big meeting is mostly a waste of time.
So the people behind the Agile Manifesto are far more experienced than some random dissatisfied dev. What I think most teams miss is that the only required meeting in the Agile manifesto is to regularly meet up to discuss what has worked and what hasnât the past few weeks, aka retrospective. If there are meetings or processes that donât work for a team and they donât change it after the next retrospective, then they simply arenât agile.
For those unaware. Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in. Which is why itâs so impressive that it was programmed this way. Itâs also a reason why the game ran so well on the hardware of the time.
In programming we talk about âhigh levelâ and âlow levelâ programming languages. The level does not mean difficulty, in laymenâs terms you can think about it about how âcloseâ you are to programing by typing in 1s and 0s. If youâre âlowâ you are very close to the ground level (the hardware). Obviously, no one programs in 1s and 0s because we created languages that convert human typed code into what a computer wants which is 1s and 0s.
Assembly is a very âlow levelâ programming language. Itâs essentially as âcloseâ to programing in 1s and 0s as you would ever get. It is still an important language today but no one in their right mind would ever program a game in it unless you were running with extremely strict hardware restrictions where every single bit of memory needed to be dealt with perfectly. Which is basically what Chris did.
I love that youâre âfor those unawareâ for assembly but not the random dude who made a video game in 1994 over 30 years ago (that I for one have never heard of).
The dude or the game? The game, Transport Tycoon, is phenomenal, and you should try OpenTTD, which is a FOSS recreation of it by fans (not in assembly).
If people these days donât know what rollercoaster tycoon is Iâm going to start feeling way more old than I already do.
a video game
Not one, like 3 or 4 of them in Assembly, the Tycoon games.
Bro is a living legend.
Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.
Back then you wrote whatever you needed to be performant and/or that involved close access to the hardware in assembler. A game would definitely count. Itâs kind of nice to do, in many ways itâs simpler than high level programming, youâve just got a lot more to keep track of.
This isnât really true on modern systems anymore. Lower level languages like C and Rust are more or less just as performant as handmade assembly.
Sure, compilers have come a long way since then and there is vanishingly little youâd write in assembler now-a-days, and youâd probably drive yourself mad trying to do so on anything more complex than a microprocessor.
Yup. And our processors are a lot more powerful, so the tricks youâd do in assembly to eek out performance just donât matter anymore.
Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.
⌠these days. I assure you all the games my mate wrote on the HP calculator back then were in Assembly. And on the PC I would certainly use C but the core of it, the displaying of pixels and low level catching of input for example, were all in assembly. But yeah, that being said, for the time, everything in assembly was a pretty crazy approach given the tools available on PC.
Assembly was the language you used to write games back then. Most 8 and 16 bit console games were written in assembly. They needed low level code for the performance.
If you played sonic spinball on the genesis/mega-drive, you played a game that struggled at 20 fps because the developers chose to write in C instead of assembly to hit their deadline. That is why most games were coded in assembly in those days.
Sawyer started developing games in 1983. He would have learned assembly, and continued using the tools and techniques he was familiar with his entire career.
Assembly was pretty uncommon by 1999. RCT is uniquely made, but not because Chris Sawyer was a unique coding genius doing what no one else could, but because he was one of the few bedroom coders of the 80s who held out that long.
Iâve read a lot of stories about it, because Iâm a fan of the game and also used to dabble in assembly myself. His motivation isnât as crazy as itâs often presented.
He used assembly because he had always programmed in assembly on a variety of hardware. He basically had every typical function documented or memorized from other projects. Just as any programmer can remember the statements in a language, he had blocks of assembly code that he could put together to do the same things. Like functions, right? If itâs made right and you know what it does, then you donât even need to look at whatâs between the brackets.
At the time he wrote RCT, he simply couldnât be bothered to start a new collection of scripts in a different language.
It still likely would have been faster for him to write anything new in a new language. And, there wouldnât have been anything stopping him from using existing assembly code in conjunction with another language.
I would say his motivation was pretty crazy. One person making a well designed and polished video game is a pretty incredible feat regardless of the language.
He loved the project, not the money.
Iâve thought of this when considering if anti-piracy measures will ever defeat pirates. Anti-piracy engineers are paid to work 40 hours a week. The pirates love it just for the fun and challenge and there are more of them and they work longer hours.
What do you think the push for cloud streaming was about?
Canât pirate it. Donât even have to sell you it, they can just rent it to you for as long as you play.
Suspect the reason thatâs cooled off a bit is because Denuvo sort of works, and consoles have proved difficult to crack.
I figured cloud streaming was an attempt to rent gaming PCs to people who couldnât afford an up front purchase but could reliably come up with $30-$100/mo or some shit. They wanted to sell even non-gamers on the idea that for a very tiny upfront purchase of a thin client - or even just installing an app - would get them a console or desktop like experience.
Lack of consumer demand is the only reason why it isnât being pushed anymore. They made a solid effort but streaming comes with loads of limitations. Itâs hard to mod. Itâs hard to get your saves and port them around. You never actually own anything. Probably the biggest thing of all is that you need a solid ISP just to try and play, then you throw in the fact that all these plebs are using wireless for everything and their wifi is hot garbage or theyâre on DSL because theyâre poor and live in the sticks and itâs effectively unplayable. You can forget about game streaming while traveling or on a cellular connection too, or even while at a hotel.