Strike Commander: Interview with Frank Savage
Summary
Despite his busy schedule he agreed to sit with me for an hour to chat about the good old days and give us a taste of the colossal amount of work the team of ten had to produce over four excruciating years. We literally had our coats on and were walking out the door when the phone rang in, you know, the early 90s like lets remember these were landlines with like really jarring bells associated with them and I was like, well, Ill just see who this is and I picked it up and it was Dallas Snell who is the VP of product development at Origin offering me the job. Fab: It feels like up to this point, they had focused mostly on the graphic rendering like maybe texture mapping and Gouraud shading and like all the tools, everything that actually makes a game had been left in disarray until you joined? John Miles did a lot of that work back in the day and then we went and and optimized it where we could for different processors as best we could at that time because there was right now if you looked at the CPU budgets for Strike Commander back in the day, probably 80 to 85 percent of the CPU is being used to draw we were fitting the entire rest of the simulation and thats flight dynamics, all the Collision, all the AI, all the control systems, like everything that was being rendered from a cockpit perspective, the mission system that was actually figuring out when the AI is were going to turn on turn off all that stuff was in 15% of like a 386 at that time if we were lucky like this is why the box says on it 486 "highly recommended". Stuff from everything which then allowed the Intel caches to do their job for real and that made just it was night and day and so that was a tremendous amount of fun being able to do to be able to do that and I got right back into it like this point like we started hiring a team for Wing Commander 3.