We built it on 386s and a week after we released it, 486s came out and broke a bunch of the puzzles
Seems to be a little confusion there. WP says the 486 came out in '89. Either he's confused about the processor or the game. Maybe the Pentium III (or Monkey Island)?
Keeping it 4:3 is a bold decision. I don't know how many people that's going to really bother. Personally, I think widescreen would be cool, assuming they can rerender the cutscenes, and some more-than-intended side scenery would look better than black rectangles at the side.
We built it on 386s and a week after we released it, 486s came out and broke a bunch of the puzzles
Seems to be a little confusion there. WP says the 486 came out in '89. Either he's confused about the processor or the game. Maybe the Pentium III (or Monkey Island)?
He's misremembering. It wasn't the processor model, but the processor speed. We had 486s at the tail end of development, but it was when speeds got above 133MHz (the highest we had during development) that some crash-causing (divide by zero when rendering video while looping back to the beginning) and completion-blocking (infamous elevator/forklift speedup) bugs revealed themselves, mostly due do higher frame rates.
We built it on 386s and a week after we released it, 486s came out and broke a bunch of the puzzles
Seems to be a little confusion there. WP says the 486 came out in '89. Either he's confused about the processor or the game. Maybe the Pentium III (or Monkey Island)?
He's misremembering. It wasn't the processor model, but the processor speed. We had 486s at the tail end of development, but it was when speeds got above 133MHz (the highest we had during development) that some crash-causing (divide by zero when rendering video while looping back to the beginning) and completion-blocking (infamous elevator/forklift speedup) bugs revealed themselves, mostly due do higher frame rates.
I can confirm. My family bought a Pentium III (500 or 550Mhz I think) in June 1999 and I got Grim Fandango right after that. I ran into the elevator bug, but I don't remember any crashes. From what you say, it sounds like the Pentium II probably hit this bug too and that came out soon before Grim, so maybe Tim is thinking of the release of the Pentium II, not the 486 if he's thinking of a specific processor.
mogul wrote:
He's misremembering. It wasn't the processor model, but the processor speed. We had 486s at the tail end of development, but it was when speeds got above 133MHz (the highest we had during development) that some crash-causing (divide by zero when rendering video while looping back to the beginning) and completion-blocking (infamous elevator/forklift speedup) bugs revealed themselves, mostly due do higher frame rates.
...and I misspoke too. I meant that we had Pentium 60s and Pentium 90s during development... GF never ran on a 486. The original CPU requirement was a P60, but we upped that to P90 by the time we shipped, based on how long production dragged out and the speed of the adoption curve. Someone in the compatibility lab had a P133 and started reporting A (crash or non-completable state) bugs to the dev team right after our gold version entered production... Basically the worst thing you can hear at the end of a game development cycle. We jumped on them and fixed them, including the elevator speed bug, in our patch.
I can imagine the pain... While you are there talking about patches, just a dev curiosity: why LA encrypted their patches? The encryption is very weak and anyway you can retrieve all the contents with a few registry hack. Thanks!
YakBizzarro wrote:I can imagine the pain... While you are there talking about patches, just a dev curiosity: why LA encrypted their patches? The encryption is very weak and anyway you can retrieve all the contents with a few registry hack. Thanks!
It was not meant to be a high barrier, just enough of one to hold off piracy for a little while; the first few days and weeks of a title being on sale are critical for game developers. As to why the patch was also encrypted, I don't remember, but it's likely because it went through the same production pipeline as the main game binary, rather than any specific concern about the patch content.
One thing I'm not keen on is keeping the 4:3 aspect ratio. The reasoning about maintaining how it originally felt strikes me as a cop out. I'm sure the real reason is that it creates too many development problems.
Please that they are remastering it though - I'll buy it regardless
nigelgos wrote:One thing I'm not keen on is keeping the 4:3 aspect ratio. The reasoning about maintaining how it originally felt strikes me as a cop out. I'm sure the real reason is that it creates too many development problems.
Please that they are remastering it though - I'll buy it regardless
Yes. My feelings exactly.
I understand keeping the videos 4:3, simply because it would be an expensive nightmare to change them all (probably have to redo them), but the gameplay backgrounds would be very simple to extend.
I have to say I am disappointed. It looks like digital-only release. No artbook, no puzzle document, no HD backgrounds, no widescreen, no boxed edition with special goodies... just redone music score and developer commentary. I'm not counting joystick support and mouse mod.
I usually wait until a sale when ordering digital games, but I made an exception here and pre-ordered it as soon as I found out that pre-orders were available. For me personally, the musical score performed live by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is worth the price of admission alone. It sounds amazing in the sample provided in the latest episode of the Making of Grim Fandango Remastered documentary.
The backgrounds look basically untouched, this is underwhelming... I understand that revising every background in photoshop would be too expensive, but they could have at least applied some filter to the backgrounds.
JenniBee wrote:I usually wait until a sale when ordering digital games, but I made an exception here and pre-ordered it as soon as I found out that pre-orders were available. For me personally, the musical score performed live by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is worth the price of admission alone. It sounds amazing in the sample provided in the latest episode of the Making of Grim Fandango Remastered documentary.
Agreed. The other biggest difference in the new lighting system which makes the game look a TON better. Plus the videos are now higher resolution than before. We'll have to take another look at Deluxe once we've played through it, and see what we might be able to add.
