farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren) (03/24/91)
NOTICE - this entire posting is Copyright (c) 1991 by Michael J. Farren. The only reproduction rights granted under this copyright are for electronic transmission between Usenet sites, and other sites connected to Usenet sites. Contact farren@well.sf.ca.us for reproduction rights other than the above. Level 4 - DON'T FENCE ME IN The last three installments have talked about Lemmings from the point of view of memory use, code size and speed, and its relationship with multitasking. This installment, which should be the last one, will look at Lemmings from the point of view of its overall friendliness to the system. Someone, either the designers or Psygnosis, made several decisions which directly affect the usability of the game, such as the customized disk format and the lack of installability on hard drives. The question is, were these decisions necessary? My answer is no, and in this installment I try and explain why. Let's start with disk usage. The developer of Lemmings has stated in a message that appeared in comp.sys.amiga.games that the custom disk driver and disk format they use allows them to cram 980K on a disk. Since one can presume that they actually use all of that space, this becomes one justification for NOT providing standard Amiga format diskettes. Or does it? I say no. In the first place, a huge amount of the space used on disk one is devoted to the silly animated Lemmings introduction. While this is very cute, if it came down to a choice between an 880K Amiga diskette and such a large-scale animated display, there was no *need* to choose the animation, just a desire to do so. Surely a less ambitious display could have been made, fitting in 100K less disk space. On disk two, the situation is a bit different. This disk contains the Lemming levels, and if it is full, I will presume that that's necessary for containing all of that data. I call your attention, however, to two distinct levels: A Beast of a Level, and An Awesome Level. I would be willing to bet that these two levels alone account for an enormous amount of the disk space used. Each of them is unique in their graphics; they share none of the graphic elements of any other level. More to the point, each of them is unique in their sound, and thus require significant additional disk space just to store their data. While the idea of having levels which are replications of other Psygnosis games is amusing, again it comes down to a matter of choice - they didn't *need* to include those levels, whimsical as they may be. (By the way - there's one implication that putting all of the level data on disk two brings up: additional level disks. Psygnosis, are you listening? DO IT!) Part of the goal of Psygnosis was, I am sure, to keep the game down to two disks. Each additional disk in a distribution adds significant costs to the game's production. I do not cavil with that - I just believe that with a judicious eye towards the reality of the game, and, perhaps, some reorganization and packing of the data, those two disks could easily have been standard AmigaDos disks. The question of copy protection is hereby ignored - I don't want to get into that one. As for hard drive installation, the Lemmings developer has already stated that it could be done, and that Psygnosis will sell such a version. Now, let's look at the question of memory usage. Specifically, the use of expansion memory. Oh, I know that there's a nice looking display at the beginning that says "Expansion Memory Detected and Utilized". What I would like to know, though, is simply this: utilized for *what*? If you have expansion memory, you've got enough memory to allow multiple levels to be loaded at once, thus avoiding any disk access delays, and speeding the game up significantly. Get clever about it, and you can even do things like loading the next levels during the idle time between the levels, making the whole process even more friendly. If you have expansion memory, you have the room to keep two copies of the background in memory simultaneously, allowing you to restart a level in seconds, rather than the tens of seconds it takes now (I, for one, am tired of seeing that cute sleeping lemming sprite!). Lemmings, as it stands, does none of those things, even in the presence of multi-megabytes of unused memory. And of course, there's the final benefit of expanded memory - you can multitask. Level 5 - TH-TH-TH-TH-TH-TH-THAT'S ALL, FOLKS I hope that these postings have been useful fuel for thought. I hope even more that any fledgling game developers reading this will think, the next time they do a game, about how simple it can be to have both a good game and an Amiga-friendly game. You don't have to give up much of anything, and you gain the respect and admiration of those who like to use their computers to their fullest, while not losing the respect of those who don't care. It seems to me that this is the classic "Win-Win" situation, and shouldn't we all be going for that when we can?