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Wrap Up When we finished SIN, we were pretty convinced that it was free of show-stopper bugs. Unfortunately, a few major bugs slipped through, and we immediately started working on the 1.01 patch. These bugs represented a big letdown to the team, because we literally had been in crunch time almost the entire previous year. We took a heavy beating from the online community, but after the patch was released, things started shaping up and some good reviews began to appear.
In summary, SIN was a major project, and we spent a lot of time making it fun. If we had to do it all over again, we probably wouldn’t make the conversion over to the Quake II source code; that was a major pitfall in the project. The entire team took a well-deserved vacation over the Christmas holiday and has returned refreshed and ready to begin development of Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2 and and a yet to be announced project. Scott Alden (aldie@ritual.com) is a graduate of University of Florida Computer Engineering Department (1993). He worked as a developer support engineer at 3Dfx for a year, and then went to Ritual Entertainment as one of the threee programmers on the SIN project. His next project will be programming on HEAVY METAL: F.A.K.K. 2. Ritual's Beau Anderson (beau@ritual.com) and Richard "Levelord" Gray (levelord@ritual.com) were of invaluable help in writing the art and level design portions of this article, respectively. |
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Features
We
definitely learned our lesson in regard to compatibility testing. In this
day and age, it’s extremely hard to test all possible hardware and software
configurations, but at a minimum you should test all the major hardware
vendors’ peripherals. In hindsight, we should have released a quick, small
patch to fix some of the major bugs, but we worked on lots of little bugs
that popped up during the first two weeks following the game’s release.
The 1.01 patch was about a 20MB download, but Activision offered a CD
to anyone who sent in an e-mail requesting the patch.
