simonsunnyboy wrote on 26.01.09 at 19:19:59:

Soudns like it is 90% complete  8-)

A word from the wise, Matthias (from http://digitalangelmaster.wordpress.com/page/230/):


Quote:

Quake’s 3-D Engine:  The Big Picture by Michael Abrash If you want to be a game programmer, or for that matter any sort of programmer at all, here’s the secret to success in just two words:  Ship it.  Finish the product and get it out the door, and you’ll be a hero.  It sounds simple, but it’s a surprisingly rare skill, and one that’s highly prized by software companies.  Here’s why. My friend David Stafford, co-founder of the game company Cinematronics, says that shipping software is an unnatural act, and he’s right.  Most of the fun stuff in a software project happens early on, when anything’s possible and there’s a ton of new code to write.  By the end of a project, the design is carved in stone, and most of the work involves fixing bugs, or trying to figure out how to shoehorn in yet another feature that was never planned for in the original design.  All that is a lot less fun than starting a project, and often very hard work–but it has to be done before the project can ship.  As a former manager of mine liked to say, “After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish the other 90%.”  It’s that second 90% that’s the key to success. This is true for even the most interesting projects.  I spent the last year and a half as one of three programmers writing the game Quake at id Software, doing our best to push the state of the art of multiplayer and 3-D game technology ahead of anything else on the market, working on what was probably the most-anticipated game of all time.  Exciting as it was, we hit the same rough patches toward the end as any other software project.  I am quite serious when I say that a month before shipping, we were sick to death of working on Quake. A lot of programmers get to that second 90%, get tired and bored and frustrated, and change jobs, or lose focus, or find excuses to procrastinate.  There are a million ways not to finish a project, but there’s only one way to finish:  Put your head down and grind it out until it’s done.  Do that, and I promise you the programming world will be yours. [....] Particles and unreliable packet delivery, along with dynamic lighting, which allows explosions and muzzle flashes to light up the world, were among the last additions to the Quake engine; these features made a well-rendered but somewhat sterile world come alive.  These, together with details such as menus, a ton of optimization, and a healthy dose of bug fixing, were the “second 90%” that propelled Quake from being a functional 3-D and multiplayer engine to a technological leap ahead. Ah, if only we’d had time for a third 90%!