Ron Hiler's Plan File

March 4th, 2000

I suppose the first thing I ought to explain is why I suddenly feel a plan page is needed. For those of you who follow our newsgroup (alt.games.mdestiny), you know I am a pretty prolific writer, especially when it comes to talking about our projects. I have a tendancy to spew forth all sort of minutia about the game, coding, interesting bugs, ideas, plans for the future, etc. Believe it or not, there is a reason I do that. For one thing, I have a belief (probably misplaced) that someone out there might be interesting in the rantings of a lead programmer. But also, there comes a time every once in a while when I need to take a minute away from coding and do something else, let my subconcious take over whatever problem I am working on at the moment. Many times, if I step away from a tricky bit of code for a half hour or so and deliberately not think about it, the solution becomes obvious by the time I pull the code back up.

These rantings have previously manifested themselves on our newsgroup. It is a fine forum, and many very intellegent people participate. However, as we draw ever closer to our first Alpha release, the newsgroup forum will become a place where players will want to talk strategy, set up games, ask questions, that sort of thing. No longer will my rantings be welcome there! Not, you understand, that I won't participate in the general discussions which take place there. On the contrary, I have always been and will remain a major participant on that board.

Lest you think this Plan File to always contain utter nonsense (as most often do), I want to say that, though I will on occassion drift off onto tangential material, every plan file update will contain some information about the game in some manner. I can rarely talk for five minutes without bringing up Manifest Destiny in some form or another (it makes me fairly unpopular at parties grin).

Now, there are going to be three other differences about this Plan File from others you may have read. Number one, I will update it frequently, as in, at least once a week, if not more (as opposed to once a year from some others, heh). Indeed, I will have to restrain myself from doing it too often. Two, I'm writing this straight into our HTML File Editor, so there will be no spellchecking. And don't bother to correct my spelling here. I'd be much more interested if you come across spelling errors in the game! Third difference. As I mentioned before, I am a pretty prolific writer, so these will very often be kinda long, and by no means do I promise that they will always make sense! You've been warned in advance!

With that said, why don't I say a bit about the game? The first thing anyone ever asks me when the subject of MD comes up is "When will you be finished?". I swear, I hear this question at least three times a day. I always give the same response. "When it's done". Yeah, yeah, I didn't come up with that. It was, as far as I know, a response first penned by the gang at ID Software. But, despite not being original, it is true, nontheless. I would give a date, I really would, but the absolute truth of the matter is, I just have no idea. My first notes for MD date back to March 2nd, 1998 (two years ago now). I vividly recall thinking at that time that this whole project could be easily finished in six months. Hehe. You can tell how good I am at judging release dates.

At this point, the inquirer (usually with a roll of the eyes) proceeds to the next question "Well, what is your best guess?". This is often accompanied by a slight shift in tone which conveys the message that if I don't come up with some sort of date, and I mean by-god right bloody now, I will find myself alone again at the party with only my beer for company. Still, I don't want to out and out lie about it, so I remain evasive. "Well, things are coming along pretty well now, I think we should have a playable version before too much longer, though it'll be some time before I will be satisfied to call it done".

The inquirer usually, around this time, wanders off looking for a partner more able to give a straight answer.

Alright, I'll give in a little bit. I suppose it can't hurt too much. We do have a schedule. IF we don't fall behind schedule, and IF we've got a comprehensive list of everything we need to do before the game is playable, and IF there are no more major problems (ala the main map, which took some eight months to write the code for!), we will have a playable game at the end of April. Not a finished game, by any means whatsoever, but one that is playable at a very basic level, against human opponents only (the computer AI will be totally brain dead at that stage). And with a fair number of bugs still present.

That's a lot of IF's. To be completely honest, I very much doubt the first two will hold true. As I write this, we are scheduled to have 15 of our items (out of 51, I beleive) finished by tomorrow. We have 12 done. Already slightly behind, though not too badly. We could hit 15 by tomorrow, it all depends on how things go. The second I already know not to be true. As I code the game, I come across things which need to be done which aren't really on our list, which were overlooked. Generally speaking, these are little things, and can be stuck into a list item, or just coded in a couple of hours. No big deal, but part of the reason we are slightly behind already. I expect more of these to crop up as the game gets closer, though. As for the third IF, it is a wild card, totally unpredictable. It could strike at any time, and cause us to take four months on one item, where we meant only to take a day or two. I hope none of these pop up. I'm optimistically expecting that none will. Given what we have left, I don't see anything that might cause one of these, but you never know....

Alright, this is long enough, I think. If possible, I will try to convince Jim (our lead artist) to start one of these things at some point. Jim is a much more private person than I am (obviously), so he may not have any desire to write a plan file. Y'all might be stuck with just me, at least, for now!

- Ron Hiler (Lead Programmer)