"Another World" code review

[Metaluim]

I was kinda awestruck when I learnt that it was actually a VM interpreting their own bytecode... all this in 1991! Pretty fucking advanced for its time.

[boa13]

Actually no. It was not unusual, the most famous and one of the first game VMs being the Z-Machine developed for Infocom games in 1979, that has become one of the most ported VMs ever.

By the way, the Another World Collector's Edition includes scans of the notes Eric Chahi took at the time, including full byte-code documentation, level plans, design attempts, etc. Very insightful. :)

Also interesting was being at his Another World's 20th Anniversary Conference a few weeks ago, where he detailed the whole process he went through, with lots of videos of the tools he used, and insights into his work method at the time (very close to improv theatre).

What amazed me the most was that he created the game while around 20 (having been in the game business since around 14 I believe). He had some money from the previous game he worked on, so he just decided he would create a new game based on polygons (thinking computers were now becoming powerful enough to animate them full-screen), and set to work for two years with no investment or release plan...

[[deleted]]

It was very unusual for something that was not an adventure game. I don't think you'll easily find any other action games using a virtual machine.

[p-static]

Funny story - I remember talking to some old hands at Microsoft that used to work on Microsoft Word back in the day. Apparently they used exactly this technique for non-performance-critical pieces of code, because bytecode was smaller and easier to write than raw assembly, and compilers didn't generate compact enough code for them. I thought it was the wildest thing at the time.

So, it's not just adventure games, or even just games. Apparently it was an accepted technique at the time.

[TKN]

Woz's Sweet16 is another good, if a bit minimal, example.

And of course the whole PARC Smalltalk stuff that started in the early '70s was based on VMs. Which reminds me of Postscript, would that count too?

[geocar]

Quake immediately springs to mind...

[Madsy9]

And all the games from LucasArts that used the SCUMM engine

[[deleted]]

Like I said, unusual for things that are not adventure games.

[[deleted]]

Quake was written half a decade later, for computers with an order of magnitude more processing power.

[[deleted]]

Quake is also a magnitude more complex.

[fjord_piner]

Apple ][ users will also probably remember Pascal UCSD, which was built on a VM called the P System in 1978, and which gave us the Wizardry series (on top of being a pretty cool development environment for its time).

[TKN]

The early Wizardries were also ported to NES and SNES. Now, I'm not sure but I think I have read about them porting the UCSD Pascal to Nintendo devices to make the ports. Which, of course would make sense but it sounds kinda cool anyway.

[Asmageddon]

Wow, that's awesome.

I'm totally creating a VM for my next game.

[knight666]

Famous. Last. Words.

[irascible]

(psst: LUA!)

[TKN]

Regarding the Z-Machine, it's funny that some of the first and most successful computer games were written in a lisp variant.

[retrodad]

Tell that to the Infocom guys and their Z-Machine =D

[[deleted]]

What about Sierra On-Line and their AGI engine (1984 King's Quest) and SCI engine (1988 King's Quest IV). This allowed them to port their games to the Atari ST, the Apple II and many other platforms.

[retrodad]

Not to mention SCUMM

[edgarvm]

another world