Lost Energy

A post in another section got me to thinking...

All the effort and energy we put into our programming work.. will it all be for nothing eventually, as computers progress, will B3d be forgotten and lost for ever... what about our earlier stuff?

I honestly don't think anyone is seriously considering how their work will last over the next 10-30 years, or even their lifetime.

Think of all the fantastic games produced in the 1980's for Atari, CBM, BBC, Sinclair, Oric etc. I guess some of these are able to be emulated now, so will all our work go into history with not so much as a 'hey look at this great game'? I had a game published on the 8-bit Atari many moons ago - I haven't seen it for nearly 20 years! I have a huge amount of Atari hardware in my attic, but no space to get it out - and what about all the 16 bit dev stuff I did?

Sigh - all lost and forgotten I think.

I honestly think it will be lost - sadly - perhaps someone should set up a human code library archive for every worthwhile game/app ever made?

A lot of energy has gone into my work - and I guess I'm just like you lot so multiply that energy up by how many members we have and - wow that's a lot of work - all potentially lost eventually!

:(

sniff...


IPete2.

..well..as someone mentioned here, DX7 is no longer supported...therefore it means that its question of time when good old beauty B3D will be useless... :(

I think the same thing every so often. I have some cool stuff on my Amiga that I STILL haven't ported off to run in an emulator (although I got all my music mods off of it). I guess that in the future PCs will have Windows XP (with DX7 or whatever) emulators and you'll be able to run old games (although some may of course have problems). Same with Mac. At least I hope so as I don't want all my old games to be unplayable in 10 years. One possibility is to take a high quality video of them in action I guess as that should be very portable as PCs change...

so... take a video of every possible action in the game and then write (or get your quantum computer to write) a program that plays the appropriate video depending on your actions?

sounds good, now all we need is a couple of terabytes of storage. :)


*EDIT*

I suppose I should try and say something serious and thread related.

How about this:

Is it a waste of energy to tell the person you love how you feel, knowing that they will die at some point?
Is it a waste of energy for a great singer to have sung (without recording)?

What if a game you make today inspires a child to become a games creator? What if that child makes games that turn out to be the most fantastic thing ever? Have you wasted your time?

Whether the original work is lost or not is irrelevant in these cases. The fact that you did it is all that really matters.

Ooh I feel all philosophicalized...

When I was a kid I once set out to make a "game" by drawing scenes on a4 paper and then moving from paper to paper depending on what you "did". I drew a cockpit view and outside there was a rocket heading for the player. Then I think I drew one more scene where the rocket just flew by on the right... after that I stopped drawing and went to do something else.

On topic, I wouldn't worry to much about it.

So far for on topic.

Well the following is actually related. I remember when I went shopping for 5 1/4 inch disks for my commodore 64 (10 or 15 years ago) and no store was selling them anymore. In the end I did buy a box full but they turned out to be the wrong kind (DOS or high density or something like that).

edit: I agree with Perturbatio's philosophicalizations.

Here is the problem. Doing so would be illegal. That game you wrote for the Atari 20 years ago? Enters the Public Domain in 50 (although by then it'll probably be extended to 100). So yeah, with copyright on software lasting an order of magnitude longer than the hardware needed to execute it, only criminals will be able to enjoy a rich video game culture.

Wow. That's way too deep for an Internet forum.

I don't think it's all for nought. Just about any computer you can think of has been emulated (cue Flameduck's list of a 1001 machines that haven't). Playability is what stands the test of time... and nostalgia.

How much have you learned in programming (assuming your not already a god)? I would say its all worthwhile, even if the stuff we create gets ditched.

Foppy: did you get out much as a child? Or was the door covered in paper covered in your scribbles? Nice idea though, I built a VR helmet out of cardboard and paper once, it had a cockpit view on the paper which you looked at through the cardboard helmet. All was fine until we simulated getting shot at by setting fire to it while wearing it.....

if dx7 support will be dropped in future, many many computers will still be able to run our good old b3d games. not every comp is updated as soon as dx7 support is dropped. i don't see here a problem. at least for the next few years - so blitz3d has enough way to go imho.

No guys...

I am not JUST talking about B3d - I mean every fully working code/game/application you ever wrote on any computer in any language.

If like me you have spent a 2/3rds of your lifetime coding then that's a lot of work / energy.

Of course when we all die, we lose everything anyway so my worry becomes irrelevant to me, but what about those who knew me?

I read something today in Edge of a man who played and visited his late Mums "Animal Crossing" world, and I guess it touched me to think of that as a life experience - for that guy, visiting and sharing in her town.

IPete2.

dont worry about that pete. thats just life.
even when you buy a new car - this will not last forever. of course you worked hard for buying that car, but if its wrecked, wou'll by another one (and work again for that) - thats just the way it is... you can exchange the word "car" with nearly everything in life (TV, motorbike, software, whatever) - it will still be the same.

no need to worry about that. lifes too short!

You don't even have to go back as far as the old 8 and 16 bit platforms -- even many games written during the past decade are completely unusable since they were written under Windows 95/98/ME and aren't compatible with XP/Vista... Even in compatibility mode you can't run them.

(Although I've played a few through a virtual Win98 in VMWare under XP -- that works OK, but it's hardly mainstream. At least old games aren't that CPU intensive on current computers, so you can deal with the virtualization overhead)

I have gigabytes of information sitting on disks and CD's that I havent used in ages.

When I was a kid I made a scrolling shooter game where there was a really long piece of paper with scenery on it would around two sticks in a box with a hole cut out for the screen. Then your ship was stuck on a cardboard arm. You scrolled the paper (or got someone else to) by turning the sticks and had to avoid to walls by moving your ship around.

Hehe, yet more proof that game developers are born that way!

I remember a saying that may be relevant: It's the journey, not the destination, that's important. Or something like that, so it wasn't a waste of energy because the process you went through is ultimately what you got out of it.

/philosolphizationing

Its reassuring to know I move among a well adjusted set of people - nice replies guys!

Cheers and about that journey... let's continiue on our way...

IPete2.

I know it's true that you are supposed to enjoy the journey (and I do that) but it's ALSO very satisfying to see a game finally launched and to receive royalties etc :-)

In case you haven't noticed, since we entered the digital age and store our knowledge on digital devices, every day the library of Alexandria is burning somewhere - meaning that humanity loses large amounts of knowledge everyday without anybody really noticing. Just look for how often you read that some governmental institute in some country has lost tons of (reasearch) data due to a hardware failure and not-working backups. It really happens everyday, and not only with NASA or the United Nations, which are two of the most prominent examples.

Games: I think you might have a hard time finding a working original Pac Man machine somewhere outside a museum. But look at the long list of clones of that game. It survived.

Look at all those Tetris clones.

Look at all those clones you guys have written of old Atari/Commodore/Apple II games.

At least the popular ones seem to survive somehow. But what board games besides chess do you know that have survived the last couple of centuries? Sooner or later, everything will be forgotten.

You need to make peace with yourself and find out how badly you want to have your own apple tree or monument. And if it's really worth spending some or most of your life-time on it.

This is the primary reason i am opting for open standards and cross platform.
Those standards are more likely to survive a lot longer and even if not, at least the information is there and public for people to build emulators/wrappers rather than locked away in some greedy corp's vault (or if the company goes bust or platform dies).

Edit: I just want to add, up until a few years ago i still had all my spectrum and amiga stuff that ran quite happily in an emulator. Unfortunately it was wiped out by my own stupidity/financial situation as it was in the days where CD burners cost the earth and "fashionable" windows 98 viruses were rampaging nastys and written to just cause pointless vandilism rather than for theft and spying etc.
Got no excuse these days though other than a natural disaster.

Well you're allowed to think it, however you'd be wrong as it is in fact the second most popular arcade game amongst private collectors, with only Ms. Pac-man being more popular.

Now that I'm nearly 36, I sometimes wonder what the heck I spent the past 5 years sitting in front of the puter for. Got plenty of time for this sitting around vegetating lark when I'm old, cranky and can't get around like I used to.

So just recently I've been making an effort to get away from the puters and development. Usually end up painting and drawing instead lol.

I must be doing something right, I'm weighing in at under 200lbs for the first time in a couple of years.