fuzmeister: Past Lives of Game Dev
It's hard to believe that later this spring it will be 20 years since I first used the name S&F Software to brand a game project. While I can't remember exactly the first game I used it for, I'm sure it was super horrible as I was learning as I went along.
Interesting story about why I styled it as S+F Software for so many years - back in the Visual Basic days, using an ampersand before any character in a VB component field caused the character directly after to be underlined rather than actually showing the ampersand. I'm sure there was some escape string or something to actually show this character, but I had no idea what any of that stuff even was back then.
Lately I've been going through some old S&F Software game files and lamenting the lack of being able to actually play through any of these classics. In an effort for historical preservation, I recently wrote an extraction tool for several of the old file formats - FRX (Visual Basic's form binary file), SFP (uncompressed pack of binary files - graphics and sound usually), and the 2004 Iceman DX levels.
For some odd reason, the way VB handled writing the Iceman DX level files was really funky - despite using integers to store everything, it seems like VB decided to allocate 128 bytes for every "record" that was persisted. I'm fairly certain this wasn't by my own design. Either way, I wrote an extractor to downsize the old level files and was able to extract over 3MB of the original level data to just 25.6k in the new "format." It's insane the levels were so large in the first place all things considered.
Most of the old projects I have code for, but some of the big ones like Trevor 2 are missing. Ideally, I've always wanted to rewrite/port the code to something that could be run on modern computers, but I'm not sure I can justify the time it takes to do so. I did this with Helibomber DX a few years ago and released the game via a HumbleStore widget - turned out alright and was a fun trip down memory lane, but, again, it takes some time to do these little projects.
I'm grateful for the friendships formed and knowledge gained during my formative years of game development and design. I sometimes wish I had handled things differently on both the technical and social sides of it, but I think S&F was ultimately a good experience for all involved albeit a chaotic mess at times.
Mood: Nostalgic
Music: Audioslave - Revelations
Tags (beta): game development
It's hard to believe that later this spring it will be 20 years since I first used the name S&F Software to brand a game project. While I can't remember exactly the first game I used it for, I'm sure it was super horrible as I was learning as I went along.
Interesting story about why I styled it as S+F Software for so many years - back in the Visual Basic days, using an ampersand before any character in a VB component field caused the character directly after to be underlined rather than actually showing the ampersand. I'm sure there was some escape string or something to actually show this character, but I had no idea what any of that stuff even was back then.
Lately I've been going through some old S&F Software game files and lamenting the lack of being able to actually play through any of these classics. In an effort for historical preservation, I recently wrote an extraction tool for several of the old file formats - FRX (Visual Basic's form binary file), SFP (uncompressed pack of binary files - graphics and sound usually), and the 2004 Iceman DX levels.
For some odd reason, the way VB handled writing the Iceman DX level files was really funky - despite using integers to store everything, it seems like VB decided to allocate 128 bytes for every "record" that was persisted. I'm fairly certain this wasn't by my own design. Either way, I wrote an extractor to downsize the old level files and was able to extract over 3MB of the original level data to just 25.6k in the new "format." It's insane the levels were so large in the first place all things considered.
Most of the old projects I have code for, but some of the big ones like Trevor 2 are missing. Ideally, I've always wanted to rewrite/port the code to something that could be run on modern computers, but I'm not sure I can justify the time it takes to do so. I did this with Helibomber DX a few years ago and released the game via a HumbleStore widget - turned out alright and was a fun trip down memory lane, but, again, it takes some time to do these little projects.
I'm grateful for the friendships formed and knowledge gained during my formative years of game development and design. I sometimes wish I had handled things differently on both the technical and social sides of it, but I think S&F was ultimately a good experience for all involved albeit a chaotic mess at times.
Mood: Nostalgic
Music: Audioslave - Revelations
Tags (beta): game development
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