www.netmech.org/forums PostPosted: Fri Dec 09, 2005 12:01 pm Post subject: Re: greetings, programs Here are the Portal of Evil links: http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000728978&pi=1000728978 http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000729234&pi=1000729234 http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000730796&pi=1000730796 http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000749093&pi=1000749093 http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000750282&pi=1000750282 http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000755026&pi=1000755026 http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000755856&pi=1000755856 http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?si=31&fi=U3103&ti=1000766427&pi=1000766427 There's a little bit more but it's kind of irrelevant and will be rewritten as soon as I am able. Sorry if there is some later stuff here already covered by that. Who was the flight simulation guy, you ask? That's easy. Me. I did commercial flight simulators for several years right out of college in my previous incarnation as an aerospace wonk. Mech 2 is based on some flight sim code I wrote the year before, which was pretty radical at the time because it rused (gasp) a personal computer instead of a roomful of mainframes. All I wanted to do in college was realtime 3D which was incredibly expensive and exotic at the time. It's a point of pride that the flight simulator is still in daily use at a KLM training facility, and they know it is basically the Mech 2 engine, which they got a huge kick from. The bottom fell out of flight simulators following the first Persian Gulf war and I found myself out of work. I was really damn glad my car had been paid off long before, otherwise I would have lost it. I still have the thing, a Miata that I bought new and actually had to (horrors) fix the water pump at 60,000 miles and change the sparkplug wires at 100,000. I guess I've stuck a timing belt in there a couple of times too..I still have the thing and drive the living snot out of it, always have. After all, that's why I bought it. In SoCal, I once went 202 days with the top in proper operationg position (i.e. down.) except to wash the thing. But anyway, I digress. Actually, there really weren't two teams. Truth. There only sort of was. Basically everyone quit, one by one, over a period of two and a half years because it sucked so unbelievably hard. It was widely reported in the press the first team was fired. That is absolutely un true. The only person actually fired was the mind-bogglingly incompetent and stupid producer. (Here's an example: when the game was already more than a year late, he pulled me in his office and chewed my ass out. He said we both knew this polygon crap was complete bullshit. If I were halfway competent, the game would of course run in high resolution, true color, and ray-trace. This is in 1996 or whatever it was, on an 8 megabyte 486/50 with a 76.8 AT-bus 8-bit video card I think. I'm not kidding. Any of the artists or programmers will back me up.) His name is Kelly Zmak. He still hates my guts and he's still stupid, although he has since actually heard of polygons and all kinds of things. Someone sent me news of him over AIM a few months ago. He somehow found the Portal Of Evil posts, and hoo boy was he PISSED OFF. I cried gigantic salty tears for him because life is so hard. Ho ho ho. One fine morning, I was riding up in the elevator and lo, precisely all the people I least wanted to see were there. Oh, boy. The president, the CEO, the CFO, the CEO's partner and maybe a couple of executive types. They asked me (all cheery) "So! What's your confidence level on the project?" I thought about it a minute then said "What do you mean, like a percent?" "Why sure, give us a percent and thank you!" Yuk yuk yuk all the way around. I thought about it a minute, then told them"that's easy. Zero. Kelly Zmak is still in charge and he's in so deep he needs a snorkel to breathe. I'm sorry, gentlemen. I wish I had better news for you." They stared at me in shocked disbelief on my way out of the elevator; I felt like shit for having to say that crap and I was really pissed off. So I went to work and spent the usual pointless 13 or 14 hour day accomplishing exactly nothing. Guess how long it took to lose him and you'd probably be right. We spent that night on a massive party, drinking champagne paid for by the company, and the programmers all took off and went to Disneyland the next day, a Friday, also on the company tab. Hee hee. It was awesome. Zmak was also producing I think five out-of-house titles; Activision instantly canceled all the contracts. (Oh, I guess there were a couple of incompetent artists who were, ahem, " let go" early on after they'd been there maybe two days, but they were completely irrelevant and no one remembers them anyway. I sort of recall one idiot that showed up his first two days at like six and seven in the evening, didn't accomplish anything, worked about an hour, then whined bitterly trying to get me to say it was ok if he he didn't come in that weekend or Monday (it was a Friday night), which I wasn't going to do, and of course I didn't have the authority anyway; I'm a programmer, not the art director or project management. Years later he had Activision and MW2 on his resume and applied to someone that knew me. When this guy (a very competent artist) said "oh, you know -r" the clown just got beet red, turned around, and left games forever. But other than trivial crap like that, no one that ever made any difference whatsoever was fired except the producer. In a weird twist, the Thunderseat guy ended up in my old office at the flight simulator company. I have a bunch of old magazines with Thunderseat and Mech 2 ads on the same page. There is also a good reason why it ran so well with a Thrustmaster stick, throttle, and rudder pedals -- that's exactly what Thrustmaster put on my desk. Anyway, thank you for your kind words. Unfortunately, I won't be working for about a year (I posted about this somewhere in this thread) because I'm seriously ill. By "seriously ill" what I mean is "on the waiting list for a liver transplant", which is to say life sucks right now. Gentlemen, avoid Tylenol. It can kill you. A lot of doctors want to make it prescription-only. So I'm eventually going to need damned near a million bucks and I have no insurance right now. (I was also just denied social security disability for the second time after twenty years in commercial flight simulators and games, not to mention being disabled as hell. Go figure.) I'll get the cash somewhere even if I have to borrow it, also I need to leave in a few minutes and can put in for Medicaid which I may even get. n the meantime I am absolutely flat broke and living with my mom. I really, really hate to beg, but I've got a stupid pay pal thing selling a really beautiful and fast, fast, fast fractal landscape generator I wrote. It does a lot of other stuff too, if any of you guys can help out I'd be delighted to send the executable and the source too if anybody wants it. I'll post some screenshots later from my Portal of Evil (not PoE news) user forum. (There's something about it upthread I think. It'd make Christmas at least somewhat possible. Apologies for rotten well asking for money, I hate that, but I would be wildly appreciative, gang. Speaking of the artists, I remain close personal friends with all of them I haven't lost track of. I've been in touch in the last few days with several, including the guy that did the cover art. He was a former roommate of mine for years, a really great guy and extremely good artist. My rotten gmail is botched (it's a local problem of some kind), if it ever freaking well gets fixed I'll put up my email. And so it goes - r A litlle more later, gotta split.