NetMech
MechWarrior II NetMech
11/06/96 00:27
When I interviewed with Activision they had just completed MechWarrior II, and the office was riding high on the success of the game. I interviewed with several directors of games, but Sean Vesce and Zack Norman really hit it off with me when we were talking about out love of Apple II games and my senior project which showed them that I knew something about 3 terrain generation. They were in the very initial stages of starting to put together a team for Interstate ’76 and I got the sense that they would be great to work with.
When I spoke to the development director, John Spinale, at the end of the interview I had mentioned that I did some work with networking in college by re-writing the doom net connect code to be a chat program. When he offered me the job, he said that the I’76 team wanted me, but that I would be needed to finish up the networking expansion of MechWarrior. Little did I know at the time that it was because the guy that was writing it had just quit.
So my first day there they introduce me to Dan Kegel, a graduate of caltech, a big proponent of a new phone technology called DSL, and the other network programmer. The gotcha here is that Dan claims to have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and he needs a typist. Lets just say that this wasn’t exactly what I had planned, but I really wanted to get into the game industry, and couldn’t believe I was working at Activision.
It turned out that Dan, as most CalTech people I have met, had less than great interpersonal skills. While I know he was a good person with good intentions, he had a way of often coming off as a complete dick. Sorry Dan, it’s true. I think he knew it a bit too. Still we hung out and had some fun venturing into the artistic fringes of high technology at the time, and he showed me where the best damn tech book store in LA is located.
Anyway we plugged away at networking before the days of the internet really caught on. No sort of windows direct connect API’s existed in those days, and lots of people still connected with serial and parallel ports to play their games. It was the very lowest level shit we were playing with, and there was really only one book on how to program for TCP/IP and Novel IPX. We used dwango, greenleaf technologies com libraries, and direct IPX driver interrupt calls. Interesting stuff, but I’m sure glad those days are gone.
When I spoke to the development director, John Spinale, at the end of the interview I had mentioned that I did some work with networking in college by re-writing the doom net connect code to be a chat program. When he offered me the job, he said that the I’76 team wanted me, but that I would be needed to finish up the networking expansion of MechWarrior. Little did I know at the time that it was because the guy that was writing it had just quit.
So my first day there they introduce me to Dan Kegel, a graduate of caltech, a big proponent of a new phone technology called DSL, and the other network programmer. The gotcha here is that Dan claims to have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and he needs a typist. Lets just say that this wasn’t exactly what I had planned, but I really wanted to get into the game industry, and couldn’t believe I was working at Activision.
It turned out that Dan, as most CalTech people I have met, had less than great interpersonal skills. While I know he was a good person with good intentions, he had a way of often coming off as a complete dick. Sorry Dan, it’s true. I think he knew it a bit too. Still we hung out and had some fun venturing into the artistic fringes of high technology at the time, and he showed me where the best damn tech book store in LA is located.
Anyway we plugged away at networking before the days of the internet really caught on. No sort of windows direct connect API’s existed in those days, and lots of people still connected with serial and parallel ports to play their games. It was the very lowest level shit we were playing with, and there was really only one book on how to program for TCP/IP and Novel IPX. We used dwango, greenleaf technologies com libraries, and direct IPX driver interrupt calls. Interesting stuff, but I’m sure glad those days are gone.