i wish i could have been a fly on the wall at naughty dog during the development of these games.
or better yet, i wish andy gavin would get so unbelievably bored that he would brain dump every last detail he remembers about designing and implementing goal, or share the source. it’s tragic that knowledge and experience will vanish
Yeah he dumped a fair bit about GOOL, the precursor to GOAL for Crash Bandicoot, but not a peep about GOAL. Funny to see this on HN because I was just looking into all of this yesterday. I wish these old games could get a source release so we could just see the magic. PS1/PS2 era Naughty Dog and Insomniac were on another level. The decompiled GOAL code that's available is neat but it clearly is the code after macro expansion and potentially other passes have been done so it's no substitute for the original source.
I am intrigued why other games never tried to make a similar solution to GOAL. I read interviews with GOAL and heard how designers could edit properties on a running build in real time.
Some 2D centric engines have scripting languages to do similar feats, but Im guessing the complexity of games simply outstripped the ability to get tight iteration times.
This is one of my favorite OSS gaming projects going on right now. Three quite good games that used a custom language being taken apart to reverse engineer the language and thus how the game ran.
Oh that would be incredible. I've been waiting almost two decades to play Daxter without the stupid-ass design decision to make "up" on the slide pad be slightly to the side of "straight forward" in the game.
You would think, but nobody's done it. Maybe fixing it that way breaks direction functionality somewhere else, like aiming or menu-ing. For the life of me I have never been able to figure out why the devs did that.