Wing Commander Source Code

Nobody really *cared*--game development was something that was constantly moving forward at the time, no one really believed that we would want to rebuild old games twenty years later. Wing Commander 3's codebase went off to outside developers for various ports and that was all anybody ever really thought about it.

No, I didn't mean that. Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought what you meant with:

There's a list of completed-but-unreleased games as long as my arm that are lost to history because Origin didn't have some system for preserving them (Wing Commander 2 SNES, Bioforge Plus, Ultima 8 Lost Vale, Wing Commander 3 Saturn and so on).

Was that these games were supposed to be released, but couldn't, because the people at Origin accidentally deleted the source codes before release. (Sort of like what happened in the Strike Commander anecdote)

About the "no one really believed that we would want to rebuild old games twenty years later".. hm, short sighted. At least in the WC3 era the people at Origin should have known better. There was a lot of hype in the mid 90s about the merging of Hollywood and the video game industry, talks about "video game oscars", video games (especially FMV titles) to be "the future of entertainment". One would think that the source code of the first landmark titles would be worth something in ten-twenty years.
 
Was that these games were supposed to be released, but couldn't, because the people at Origin accidentally deleted the source codes before release. (Sort of like what happened in the Strike Commander anecdote)

Ah! No, all of those are games that made it through to the very end of their development cycle and then weren't released for financial reasons--usually because management decided it would cost more to print them than they would make back.

From my list above:

- Wing Commander 3 Saturn was a case of backing the wrong horse. By the time it was ready for market the Sega Saturn was entirely dead. EA had a complicated relationship with console developers in the mid-90s. 3DO was owned by their founder Trip Hawkins and they threw the weight of their best development houses at putting out 3DO games. Origin was the most succesful with Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander III 3DO... but the system died early, killing Wing Commander 4 3DO and Wing Commander 3 for the M2 which were fairly far along. After that they went with the Sega Saturn, which met the same fate. They worked on two waves of titles--Wing Commander 3 and Crusader No Remorse was to be the first and Wing Commander 4 and Crusader No Regret would be the second. No Remorse came out, Wing Commander 3 was delayed past the death of the Saturn. Even the second wave was playable, though... I have a Saturn No Regret build disc.

- Wing Commander 2 SNES is the saddest of all. It was *absolutely finished* and was supposed to be an amazing version of the game... but they did it too late. The game was sent off to Pony Canyon for duplication and it was even sent to magazine reviewers (since there was a several month lead time for such things at the time)... and while that was happening the Christmas sales numbers for the SNES came out were far lower than expected (that was Christmas '94). That coupled with the fact that the game required an especially expensive cartridge with extra memory (similar to... Starfox, I think?) killed the release. Much earlier there was also a long-suffering Genesis port of Wing Commander that was supposed to be a more stripped down arcade game. That made it far enough to show up in advertising--no idea what killed it (it was distinct from the SegaCD project, which was done by an outside group).

- Ultima 8 Lost Vale and Bioforge Plus were both cases were lots of work went into sequels before the numbers came back to show they were following flops. The expectation was that of course Ultima 8 would have an addon and so it was developed during and immediately after U8, with all the hooks and such in place in the original game... but U8 was such a financial disaster that they decided there wasn't any money in putting it out. Bioforge Plus started life as a sequel to Bioforge that became an addon to the original and then a 'gold version' and then nothing as the losses on that project were calculated.

About the "no one really believed that we would want to rebuild old games twenty years later".. hm, short sighted. At least in the WC3 era the people at Origin should have known better. There was a lot of hype in the mid 90s about the merging of Hollywood and the video game industry, talks about "video game oscars", video games (especially FMV titles) to be "the future of entertainment". One would think that the source code of the first landmark titles would be worth something in ten-twenty years.

Similarly, some huge percent of pre-1920 films are lost today--the technology wasn't suitable for preserving them and the folks who owned them didn't think they'd ever be useful again. (And it probably isn't a great analogy, either, since Origin did save the games themselves... versus Hollywood which certainly still doesn't save all the props and actors and materials needed to rebuild films from parts.)
 
Ooh, and I forgot A-10--that was a big budget game that died at the very end of its cycle.

I bet that's in a vault somewhere, though.
 
Similarly, some huge percent of pre-1920 films are lost today--the technology wasn't suitable for preserving them and the folks who owned them didn't think they'd ever be useful again. (And it probably isn't a great analogy, either, since Origin did save the games themselves... versus Hollywood which certainly still doesn't save all the props and actors and materials needed to rebuild films from parts.)

I still don't buy this. First of all, there was no technology boundary to preserving the final version of the source code of a game in the mid 90's. That's nothing. Secondly, they had to know they would be useful again. For sequels at the very least. In many cases (Wing Commander I to Wing Commander II, for example) the sequel was heavily based on the code of the original. And you can be sure that whatever modifications you make for the sequel, the original is still around for reference. Every software company I have ever worked for still has their source code to everything they have ever released, even going back to the 80's. And as I said, the source code to many games from that era is still around, even from small companies. You don't just lose track of that stuff. The reason they are lost now has to be because Origin closed, not because they weren't keeping track of it back then. Not that that really helps anything now, unfortunately.
 
They *really* weren't keeping track of it back then.

Origin was a great place, but they didn't work the way you're imagining. There was an extreme informality--this is the company that left the 'Worlds of Ultima' games off their Ultima Collection package because someone had taken the copy from the company library home and forgotten to bring back the disks.

(Why doesn't Super Wing Commander use the Wing Commander I ships? They didn't have the models cataloged and accessible. Captain Johnny found them unlabeled on a CD years later... an incomplete set lumped in with Privateer and Strike Commander assets.)
 
I have a friend who was contracted a few years ago to remake a classic mash-button fighting game for use on xbox live.. everything was ready to go, the code had started and then they sent him the art assets.. which were all in a proprietary format that nobody still at the company has any idea how to open.

needless to say they are making something new instead now.
 
The Gameboy Advance port is another example. EA didn't even have a retail copy of the game available to send the developers in 2002. The CIC staff rounded up all the material we could find (game, official guide, script, concept art, etc) and shipped it off to Italy. We later did find copies of Prophecy in a dusty cardboard box in the Mythic Archive years later, but EA couldn't get to it when it came up. All of you working for small developers thinking that if you could do it, a big company must have are missing how it's even harder with a large company and hundreds of people each doing a tiny piece of things.

I don't find any of this particularly sad or disturbing, because we're here to close the gap. :) There's countless games from lots of companies that are "lost." The sad part is when there's no community there to hold things together. It goes way beyond software to the lore behind the games too. When EA doesn't know what model number its new Dralthi should be, they call us up and we tell them "Dralthi IX" sounds reasonable. I'm so much more confident about the state of Wing Commander than so many other classic series. :)
 
The Gameboy Advance port is another example. EA didn't even have a retail copy of the game available to send the developers in 2002.



Eh.

My God! That a professional software company in the 21st century works like that.. unreal.

Did they treat other projects that way, too?
 
I think everyone's shock and awe is very misplaced. The stories I could tell you about building airplanes... :)
 
All of you working for small developers thinking that if you could do it, a big company must have are missing how it's even harder with a large company and hundreds of people each doing a tiny piece of things.

I think it's just as hard.

I read/write data to my hard drives so often that I'm replacing at least one a year (Between four development machines with a total of about 6 hard drives). The lifespan of a hard drive is only about four years of day-to-day use and I'm much harder on my development hard drives then most people are.

Sometimes they go bad and there's just no way to recover the data. I no longer have copies of my original design specifications or the first version of the code for the project I'm currently working on. It's been mutated and molded so much and passed between so many people (and so many computers) there's just no way to keep track of it every time I have to copy it over to a new location.

Art Assets are a different story with the same result - we've gone through I think six artists on this project (anyone want to volunteer some time?). At least once a month one of the artist gets in touch with me and sends me something that they were working on that they suddenly found. And several times asking them to send back originals because someone lost the first file they distributed to us has resulted in them telling us they don't keep copies of our work. Say what?

I've taken to burning backup CD's periodically of the code (And whenever new artwork rolls into our office, because no matter how many times you tell someone to work on a copy and preserve the original they always think they can get it right in one shot and we'll never need the art for anything else). But that's JUST ME. And I'm JUST the Lead Programmer. So I'm only archiving my one tiny little part of the project. And I'm doing it on my own. On backup CD's (Some of which I realize are missing as I know flip through the three or four dozen I have with dated references on them).

But then you have other problems too because occasionally someone will walk into the office at 1 AM with a brilliant idea for how to change things, they will stick it in, that code will get saved to backup. Then they come back at 3 AM the next morning having figured out why the code doesn't work and they'll remove it. But now you have two different versions of the software.

Worse yet they might not have TIME to remove it, so they extraneous code just gets left there (Just look at WCP or WCSO and all the multiplayer stuff that still exists in both engines, though not enough to make it full functional as it was supposed to be). Then someone decides they have ten years of their life to read through machine code and half the code they're looking at doesn't even DO anything, but they waste time trying to figure that out...

...yeah. Backing up your Save Games and Pr0n collections to a portable hard drive is not the same as attempting to preserve original game code and artwork in a usable and later adjustable format.
 
They *really* weren't keeping track of it back then.

Origin was a great place, but they didn't work the way you're imagining. There was an extreme informality--this is the company that left the 'Worlds of Ultima' games off their Ultima Collection package because someone had taken the copy from the company library home and forgotten to bring back the disks.

Were they really that much more informal than id or 3DRealms at the time? How did they make Wing Commander 2 if they didn't even keep track of the code for Wing Commander 1? I think you have a picture of how things worked then from piecing together anecdotes from people who worked there, told to you years after the fact. People who remember their primary responsibilities there, and not the finer points of how they kept track of things.

(Why doesn't Super Wing Commander use the Wing Commander I ships? They didn't have the models cataloged and accessible. Captain Johnny found them unlabeled on a CD years later... an incomplete set lumped in with Privateer and Strike Commander assets.)

Like I said, I can totally see losing track of models and other resources, or not being able to easily access them because of file format issues and so forth. But source code is just some text files. And unlike models, older source code is something you use constantly as a developer, not even just for sequels, but because you always reuse code you have written before, even in an entirely new project. Data structures, algorithms, OS/hardware interface and all that don't get programmed from scratch for every new project. Losing track of the source code to a previous project is like throwing free work out the window. It would cost your company a lot of time and money.

What's the point of this? Just that there had to have been copies of the source code all over the place, and though we may not have found it or anyone who remembers what happened to it, it more than likely still exists in some recoverable form, unless the closing of Origin caused it to be lost for good. Even finding some of it or source code to a related project would be a huge help in reconstructing it so that something could be done with it.

The Gameboy Advance port is another example. EA didn't even have a retail copy of the game available to send the developers in 2002. The CIC staff rounded up all the material we could find (game, official guide, script, concept art, etc) and shipped it off to Italy. We later did find copies of Prophecy in a dusty cardboard box in the Mythic Archive years later, but EA couldn't get to it when it came up.

So that whole thing was a complete remake? That's pretty impressive.
 
But source code is just some text files. And unlike models, older source code is something you use constantly as a developer, not even just for sequels, but because you always reuse code you have written before, even in an entirely new project. Data structures, algorithms, OS/hardware interface and all that don't get programmed from scratch for every new project. Losing track of the source code to a previous project is like throwing free work out the window. It would cost your company a lot of time and money.

What's the point of this? Just that there had to have been copies of the source code all over the place, and though we may not have found it or anyone who remembers what happened to it, it more than likely still exists in some recoverable form, unless the closing of Origin caused it to be lost for good.

Yeah, I hear that, but I don't think that changes anything about what we're saying. Obviously stuff was used and reused in subsequent projects for a couple years, but WC3 was made virtually from scratch by new people compared to WC1, and the same applies to Prophecy compared to WC3. And all of this is talking about stuff more than a dozen years ago before what was saved was literally trucked back and forth across the country. It's not just anecdotes - I've been to EA sites from LA to Canada to the East Coast and seen inside the boxes with my own eyes. :) So yeah, in theory the Titantic rests somewhere at the bottom of the sea, and you could maybe raise it and refurbish it and sail it around the world if humanity depended on it, but that doesn't change how inaccessible it really is in a practical sense today (and they know where the Titanic is!).


So that whole thing was a complete remake? That's pretty impressive.

Yes, from scratch - plus the added multiplayer and the whole talking-heads interface in lieu of FMV. Those guys did great work.
 
Like I said, I can totally see losing track of models and other resources, or not being able to easily access them because of file format issues and so forth. But source code is just some text files. And unlike models, older source code is something you use constantly as a developer, not even just for sequels, but because you always reuse code you have written before, even in an entirely new project.


Well, to quote Bandit:

but we're talking about a different company that did tape backups so rarely and squeezed limited resources such that they once lost weeks of work on Strike Commander because an employee ran a catastrophic test build of the game on the same machine that stored the only copy of the codebase


So, the folks at Origin seemed to be really sloppy.

Though, the Strike Commander story is really incredible. I am not doubting it, but, how were they able to mess it up that much?

I guess that every developer had a copy of the source code on his/her machine. How was it possible then, that just one machine had the only copy of the codebase? Were all developers just using one PC?

The only other scenario would be, that they used some revision control system, and the test build ran on the server that hosted the revision control system. Crazy.
 
Were they really that much more informal than id or 3DRealms at the time? How did they make Wing Commander 2 if they didn't even keep track of the code for Wing Commander 1?

Of course id and 3DRealms kept very good track of their source code--that's their product! They're both companies whose business models involved developing 3D engines to license to others. That wasn't what Origin did... their purpose was different and the kind of code they created was very different (id Tech has to both work and be organized and commented in a way that everyone who licenses it can understand it... Wing Commander's source code is said to be a mess no one would ever see that did its job).

I think you have a picture of how things worked then from piecing together anecdotes from people who worked there, told to you years after the fact. People who remember their primary responsibilities there, and not the finer points of how they kept track of things.

We've been doing this since Origin was Origin, though. I visited the offices many times, I've corresponded with the people who made these games for fifteen years... I've campaigned to find where all of this material is today, officially and unofficially--I've gone through everything from former employee garages and storage units, the material donated to University of Texas, Joe's museum, Origin's own 'library', the material stored at Mythic and--I'm not making this up--Digital Anvil's trash. I have begged borrowed and stolen to find any shred of Wing Commander's development history (and we've found some pretty cool stuff).

Moreover, though, since Origin closed I've worked on multiple projects with Electronic Arts that needed the old resources... and they weren't there. I can tell you without a question in my mind that there's no EA archive full of Origin-era source code as great as that would be.
 
Though, the Strike Commander story is really incredible. I am not doubting it, but, how were they able to mess it up that much?

I can't repeat the actual technical details (...because I don't understand them...) so forgive me if this doesn't sound exactly right. The story goes that Strike Commander required so much hard drive space that it would absolutely fill the standard drives on the machines that were being used to test it... to the point that they had a process where the installer was set up to wipe out everything and write the current version of Strike over it.

They had one top-of-the-line 486 that stored the codebase. You would use it to compile the game and then you'd move it over to a lesser machine for testing. One of the programmers compiled the latest version and was so eager to check something that he ran the installer right there on the 486... which immediately cleared the drive and replaced everything with Strike Commander.

Billy Cain told me that story by way of explaining why I wasn't going to find Wing Commander 2 SNES, a project he managed, anywhere--Origin played fast and loose with that sort of thing in a way we don't today. (The other half of the story, though, is that the guy who made the mistake wasn't fired or demoted or anything like that... he put his back into replacing what was lost and the team went on its way. He went on to work on Wing III.)
 
I'm sure if EA wants to do source code for any project seeing how it's a necessity for ANY project :D. Then they'll do it.

It's a shame that they may not have previous Wing Commander games to look at for source code. But I don't think that will be a problem. With the amount of game franchises that EA owns, they have quite a few games they can look at. Do you not think that they will have some crackshot programmer at EA that would be happy to work on Wing Commander? I mean come on guys.

I agree with Bandit and have been on the forums for a few years now. I'm sure that Bandit & Chris have done as much as they could to find WC material. I mean these guys went to Mythic for goodness sake, what was it a week? two weeks? I mean that's unheard of for fans to actually dig up material of a game franchise at an actual archive of the game company, These guys Rock! :D

I would sincerely hope for a new Wing Commander remake game or even a totally new series of games. With the technology of today and extremely enhanced hardware that we have available. It would totally kick ass!

Check out WC:Arena. The graphics/art were pretty decent. And to be honest it's not exactly some extremely complex game.
 
They had one top-of-the-line 486 that stored the codebase. You would use it to compile the game and then you'd move it over to a lesser machine for testing. One of the programmers compiled the latest version and was so eager to check something that he ran the installer right there on the 486... which immediately cleared the drive and replaced everything with Strike Commander.

Interesting. But, how were they coding the game? They must have had at least portions of the source code on the PCs of the programmers?

Do you know whether they used revision control systems back then at Origin?

I don't understand why they needed a top-of-the-line 486 to store the raw code base (the text files). Even several million lines of code are just a few megabytes. Common hard drives in 1992-3 were big enough for that.


I am sorry if I am a getting on your nerves.
 
No, not at all--but as I say I'm not overly familiar with the technical details.

But--I will e-mail someone who was there and see if I can get the exact story directly for you.

(Edited to add--I *doubt* they were using any sort of revision control system at the time, but I will try and find out. 1989-1991 was a big confusing transition from developing games with a couple other guys to huge teams of coders, artists, etc. I was reading an interview from 1990 about how Origin wasn't sure they needed *one artist* on staff in 1989 but hired one anyway and found they were lucky they did... before that everything was done on a contract basis.)
 
"I don't understand why they needed a top-of-the-line 486 to store the raw code base (the text files). Even several million lines of code are just a few megabytes. Common hard drives in 1992-3 were big enough for that."

I do remember something that one of the artists had said in the forums and correct me if I'm wrong but.....when some of the artists would do 3d Renders (like you see on the covers, or even in the manuals, etc.... Sometimes the artist would start the hi resolution 3d render the night before and hopefully when they came in the next morning/day the render just might be done? And I remember that was on a 486 machine. Back in the day I don't believe the O/S programming was all that fast. Amazing.
 
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